Social and private total Hicksian incomes of multiple use forests in Spain

Abstract

The present national accounting system for forests measures only the commercial flows of the production account and the consumption of durable goods produced by human intervention, and focuses particularly on final output, while ignoring any intermediate output not arising from harvested agricultural crops. Environmental goods and services, whether for public consumption or for the landowner's private use (owner's self-consumption), are ignored in conventional measurements of the net domestic product of forests. This paper presents and applies a forest accounting methodology that overcomes these limitations and allows for homogeneous aggregation of commercial and environmental values (using exchange values, and not welfare measurements, for the latter). We have applied the accounting system proposed here to two major types of multiple-use forest of the Iberian peninsula: Mediterranean forest (Monfragüe cork oak dehesa) and conifer forest (Scottish pine in the Guadarrama mountain range). Our results show that non-commercial incomes are relatively more important in the pine forest under consideration, both in private and in social terms. Cork oak forest is notably more profitable in private terms than pine forest, however. Conventional national accounting measures only 24% and 77% of social total income in Guadarrama Scottish forest and Monfragüe cork oak dehesa, respectively.