PRODUCTIVE AND EXCHANGE SCARCITY - AN EMPIRICAL-ANALYSIS OF THE UNITED-STATES FOREST PRODUCTS INDUSTRY

This paper has two aims: clarification of several aspects of the debat e on the appropriateness of various indicators of natural resource sca rcity and the empirical analysis of the trends in the scarcity of fore st Products in the U.S. Two distinct types of indicators are developed in the natural resource scarcity literature, which we term exchange s carcity and productive scarcity. In the neoclassical paradigm, the for mer is measured by price and rental rates, and the latter by unit cost . In the biophysical literature, productive scarcity is measured by qu ality-weighted measures of unit energy cost. We test econometrically f or trends in lumber prices in the long-run period 1800 1990, for trend s in stumpage prices between 1910 and 1989, and for trends in producti ve scarcity indicators in the shorter 1947-1990 period. The empirical evidence indicates that the growth in the price of forest products as compared with other manufactured goods, and in the rental rate of timb erland, levelled off during the post-war period in the U.S. Neverthele ss, these commodities are today much more scarce than in the historic past. From the end of the 1950s, absolute and relative productive scar city declined as measured by all indicators. The levelling off of the price of forest products after 150 years of increase is consistent wit h economic theory that predicts that prices reach a plateau when extra ction from old-growth forests is replaced by forest plantations and re planting in general.