Estimates Of The Interrelationships Between Consumer Expenditures And Natural Resource Consumption

Personal consumption expenditures represent roughly two-thirds of total of GNP. While these expenditures directly account for only a small portion of total natural resource consumption, they account for a significant proportion indirectly. The reason is that all economic activity can be shown to be interrelated and that the intermediate production sectors, which are the primary users of natural resources, represent the interindustry transactions necessary to produce all final goods, including consumer goods. This paper provides a discussion of the methodology and quantitative estimates in physical units of the interrelationships between 15 major nonenergy resources and 6 energy resources and 477 personal consumption expenditure items.