FUTURE DEMAND FOR TIMBER 



373 



includes Coastal Alaska 



Figure 113 



portant because many of the factors that tend to 

 raise the price of timber products also tend to 

 force up the price of substitute materials. There 

 is also the probability that an increase in price of 

 any particular product exerts an upward pull on 

 the price of its substitutes. 



The medium projection of timber-product de- 

 mand and the upper projection both rest on the 

 assumption that price relationships will remain 

 about as they have been in recent years. Price, 

 of course, is not the only factor and often not the 

 major factor that induces substitution. Both 

 projections make substantial allowance for sub- 

 stitution of certain timber products for other 

 timber products. It has been assumed, however, 

 that these timber-for-timber substitutions will 

 tend to balance out; and that industrial wood as 



a whole will continue to occupy about the same 

 position in the Nation's raw-materials input that 

 it has occupied in recent years. 



The lower projection is based on the assump- 

 tion that there will be a substantial rise in 

 timber product prices relative to the prices of 

 competing materials. The difficulty with this 

 assumption is that it cannot be applied in any 

 concise way because there are no devices by which 

 to isolate the long-term impact of price change on 

 quantity of timber product demand, and no 

 standards by which the effects of long-term price 

 changes can be measured. 



Most of the work so far done in tracing the 

 effects of price on quantity of a product demanded 

 has been limited to short periods and to the con- 

 sumer-goods market. This study is concerned 



i^te 



