A study in economic geography, this thesis attempts to determine the importance of water for process supply and effluent disposal in industrial location decisions. It is postulated that industry faces physical, institutional, and technologic-economic constraints when evaluating the water component in location problems. Each of these three constraints is analyzed and evaluated for British Columbia's pulp and paper industry, with a view to discovering its effect on the range of spatial choice enjoyed by firms. A number of general conclusions emerge from the investigation. Although a theoretic location proof is not offered, the study raises a number of arguments which indicate water has been over-emphasized in industrial location decisions, and that industry exhibits greater spatial mobility regarding water requirements than is contended in the geographical and technical literature. Of the three constraints, it appears that those of a technologic-economic nature impose the severest limitations on spatial choice; physical, the least. Institutional regulations are found to provide industry with incorrect signals for decision making — the suggestion is offered that effluent control programs based upon economic rather than biological criteria would remove this problem. The implications of the above conclusions for future geographic inquiry regarding water management and development is considered in the concluding section of the study. / Arts, Faculty of / Geography, Department of / Graduate

The purpose of this thesis was to analyse the supply of pulp and paper products in the three major producing provinces of Canada, namely British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec. A translog restricted profit function and its first partial derivatives were estimated using the iterative seemingly unrelated regressions procedure. Derived demand equations for energy, fibre, labour and supply equations for net market pulp, newsprint and 'other paper and paperboard", (net market pulp and 'all paper and paperboard' for British Columbia) were obtained with net supplies as a function of each input and output price. The success of the model in representing the industry was mixed. Derived demand own price elasticities were, in almost all cases, negative as expected a priori. Negative own price elasticities were also found in many end product supply functions suggesting a misspecification of the supply relationship. The unexpected supply function results bring up questions about the degree of competitiveness in pulp and paper markets, and thus the validity of using the perfectly competitive market assumption in empirical studies. Finally the model was evaluated in the context of using the results in a spatial equilibrium model of the North American pulp and paper sector. / Forestry, Faculty of / Graduate