Forest Products Markets under Change: Review and Research Implications

Abstract

In terms of global forest product market developments, the twenty-first century has been in many ways very different from the twentieth century—striking structural changes have taken place. The global forest sector can be interpreted to be in a phase of creative destruction—an era characterized by a major decline of a number of established products and businesses, and simultaneous emergence of new products and businesses. The forest product research field appears to be lacking the tools for formally assessing the significance and extent of the changing production and consumption patterns. That is, the mainstream of quantitative forest product market research has relied to a large extent on forest sector modelling, focusing on questions related to the impacts of policies, sufficiency of wood resources, trends in the production of primary wood products, and international competitiveness. In doing so, they have paid less emphasis on some of the equally important questions, such as value added development, employment issues, structural changes, the diffusion of new products and services, and the realistic contribution of the forest-based sector to the global sustainability challenges. When considering the importance of global forest product markets to the economy, employment and forests, and the changes taking place in the markets, the scale of research on forest product markets is alarmingly low. This review clearly points to a need to significantly increase the volume of academic research and education on the global and regional forest-based product markets.