Social Science

The purpose of this paper is to make clear the direction of development of the world forest products trade model in the future by tracing history and revealing problems of the existing models. The transportation model is the root of the world forest products trade model, which does not have international views and consideration for forest product markets. The Timber Assessment Market Model (TAMM) was constructed in 1980 as a spatial equilibrium model which was able to take forest product markets into account. TAMM, however, did not include worldwide region. At 1987, The Global Trade Model (GTM), the first world forest products model, was built. GTM includes worldwide region and many forest products. Then, The Global Forest Products Model (GFPM), having same characters of GTM, is one of the most famous models now. GTM and GFPM possess several problems. Trade inertia works to decide bilateral trade volumes but it lacks the economic grounds to be introduced into these models. Ad varolem tariff is converted to specific tariff in these models. Because of this method, it is difficult to appreciate effects of trade policy change, such as trade liberalization. Imperfect competition has been accelerating in international forest products market but these models assume perfect competition. Forest Products and forest resources had been recognized as economic trade goods in these models. They, however, draw attention on the side of environmental goods as carbon dioxide sink. Hence it should be required to consider of both economic trade goods and environmental good on forest resources. The World Forest Products Model (WFPM) is based on the simultaneous equations model by IFPSIM. A problem of WFPM is not to analyze bilateral trade because the model solves net export as a solution in each country. By improving above problems, it is expected to develop the world forest products trade model.