Journal of Forest Economics

Most Japanese builders use laminated lumber for structural members. Major companies in the Japanese housing industry consider glulam (laminated lumber) completely seasoned wood. Glulam has therefore been replacing green lumber for columns, but some kiln dried lumber is still used as before. The use of glulam is almost equal to that of kiln dried lumber. Glulam beams are not as widely used as columns, since it is not necessary for beams to be completely seasoned. However, glulam beams used for parts to be especially heavily loaded are more valuable than dimension lumber. One reason is that recently the quality of dimension lumber, to be used for beams wider than 300mm or so, has declined. Another is that, for similar requirements in construction, the dimensions of glulam beams are smaller than those of ordinary wood, reducing the variety of lumber sizes. Glulam and some kinds of ordinary wood are almost equivalent, and the choice of material therefore depends on housing builders' preference, based on their own strategies. These circumstances, however, may change with the present development of improved wooden constructions that require more strictly seasoned wood. If this method of construction becomes popular in Japan, then subtle differences in the water content of structural members, both columns and beams, will be of greater importance, and the use of glulam will increase and exceed that of ordinary wood.

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In this paper I analyzed what kind of impact would occur to the production, consumption, export, and import of forest products in each regions in the world by comparative dynamics using modified IIASA Global Trade Model of forest products. I also clarified to what extent the system of environmental pricing will have effect to diminish the degradation of the growing stock of especially tropical forests. The results are mainly as follows. The production of nonconifer sawlog of tropical forests will decrease within 10%. In temperate and boreal zone the effect will be very small. As for the growing stock of tropical regions, in the Base Case the annual decreasing rate of growing stock were 0.16% in Latin America, 0.08% in Africa, 0.48% in Southeast Asia. Considering the damage of surrounding stumpages at the time of harvesting and road construction, each rate were 1.32%. 0.67%, 2.29%. When we carried out the environmental pricing under the very moderate assumption of deforestation, we would be able to sustain the forest stock quantity in Africa and Latin America. But under the assumption of forest degradation counting damage of surrounding stumpages at the time of harvesting and road construction, the annual decreasing rate became 0.97%, 0.48%, 1.98% in each area, Therefore the deforestation would not be stopped by only environmental pricing in all tropical regions.

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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.

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