Measuring the Effect of Internet Adoption on Paper Consumption
A large fraction of the total supply of paper is produced with technologies that have serious adverse consequences on the environment and cause significant health problems, such as cancer. This paper reports on how Internet adoption affects paper c...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank Group, Washington, DC
2014
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2014/07/19760469/measuring-effect-internet-adoption-paper-consumption http://hdl.handle.net/10986/19360 |
| Summary: | A large fraction of the total supply of
paper is produced with technologies that have serious
adverse consequences on the environment and cause
significant health problems, such as cancer. This paper
reports on how Internet adoption affects paper consumption.
The study used country-level panel data on Internet
penetration and paper consumption disaggregated into various
paper categories. The empirical strategy is to use
fixed-effect models to study whether countries with faster
Internet penetration growth have experienced faster declines
in paper consumption. The analysis finds that Internet
penetration significantly decreases aggregate paper
consumption. Further, the estimates show that Internet
growth reduces consumption for the paper categories that are
more likely to be affected by the diffusion of the Internet
(paper used to print newspapers and books and magazines),
whereas the growth of the Internet does not have a
statistically significant impact on a paper category
unlikely to be affected by the Internet (such as sanitary paper). |
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