1998 Volume 44 Issue 1 Pages 105-110
Using data from interviews with 38 sawmills in Tokushima Prefecture, three different indicators of labor productivity are constructed to analyze the differences in management strategy between groups of sawmills. Sawmills are divided into four groups according to the types of logs and products. Three of them are sawmills consuming Japanese cedar logs, and the other consists of mills that consume imported logs such as Douglas fir and hemlock. Three indicators employed in the analysis are as follows; the first is log consumption volume per mill worker per year, the second value added per mill worker per year, and the third value added per year divided by the total number of mill and other types of workers plus employers. The value added is defined as lumber sales minus log procurement costs. In terms of the first indicator, thus in terms of volume productivity, there are much differences between four sawmill groups with imported log mills having the highest productivity, whereas in terms of value added productivity measured with the second and third indicators, there appear no marked differences between groups. As regards intra-group differences of labor productivity, it is observed that although labor productivity is highly correlated with the scale of sawmill for the group consuming imported logs, it doesn't hold true for the other groups which consume domestic logs, especially when value added productivity indicators are used. These observations seem to imply, among others, the different principles in production behavior with respect to the choices of product mix and of technology between imported log sawmills and domestic log sawmills.