Estimating International Wood and Fiber Utilization Accounts in the Presence of Measurement Errors

Estimates of the amounts of wood and fiber used by various industries, and the corresponding input-output coefficients, are needed for international forest sector analysis and forecasting. Yet, only the data on total national production and trade are usually known and the production data are often inaccurate. The method proposed here builds wood and fiber utilization accounts, based on the reported data and on prior knowledge of consumption functions and of production techniques. The method first estimates the consumption of final products in countries with obvious errors or missing data, based on empirical functions linking consumption to GDP per capita. Next, a goal-programming model is used to estimate the production data by minimizing the difference between the estimated and the reported production, while keeping input-output coefficients near their prior value, and within plausible bounds. The results give estimates of the wood and other fiber utilization accounts by country, and of the corresponding input-output coefficients. The method was applied to the data from 180 countries for the year 1996. The results showed that the reported production data of several countries must be adjusted to be consistent with prior knowledge of consumption functions and of techniques of production.