Abstracts Economics

Three Studies of the Interaction between Forest Quality and Forest Sector Development

by Benjamin Filewod

Forests are central to current policy discussions around anthropogenic climate change and rapid biodiversity loss. However, forest sector development is mostly absent from research and policy agendas that focus heavily on land cover change. This is regrettable: industrial forest sectors impact ecosystems over vast areas, provide an important regional (and sometimes national) driver of economic growth, and range in approach from sustainable management to resource mining. Understanding the development of national forest products sectors is therefore a worthwhile goal, especially in countries that still retain high forest cover, and it is this effort (write large) at which this thesis is aimed. The first paper proposes a new approach to studying economically exploited forests using satellite data, arguing that easy-to-obtain attributes (location, productivity) allow exploited forests to be disaggregated by economic type. The paper produces a global classification and mapping, and shows that distinguishing the ‘quality’ of harvested forests in this way aids knowledge discovery about the sources of comparative advantage in international trade. The second paper then uses this global mapping, with minor refinements, to study the importance of materials (i.e., forest) quality within a production function framework. This effort is complicated by the existence of several fundamental and unresolved critiques of aggregate production theory, with which the paper is primarily concerned. Following a demonstration of the importance of these critiques, the second paper addresses their interrelation by comparing fully physical with economic production functions. Heterogenous panel estimators and data envelopment analysis are used to investigate the importance of aggregation for hypothesis testing in a production function framework. The third paper returns the focus to forest sector development, undertaking an exploratory empirical study of the forms of forest sector development currently in existence, as well as various hypotheses regarding their distribution across countries. Drawing on the use of cross-sectional regressions and pattern recognition in growth economics, the paper constructs a typology of forest sector outcomes, and establishes an empirical link between historical path dependence and development outcomes by constructing a dataset of start dates of higher education in forestry.