Dynamic Decomposition of Factors Influencing the Export Growth of China’s Wood Forest Products

Wood forest products (WFPs) are globally important environmental products, with economic, ecological, and renewable characteristics. China is the world’s largest WFP exporter. However, many factors, such as the downturn of traditional major export markets and the rise of the price of production factors, have generated great challenges and uncertainties for China’s WFP export market. This study improves the product scope of WFPs. The category of WFPs has been expanded to 14 categories and 30 sub-categories, which is more detailed and more developed than in previous literature. Based on the United Nations’ Comtrade Database (COMTRADE), this paper uses the revised constant market share (CMS) model to measure and analyze empirically the factors affecting the export growth of China’s WFPs from the perspective of market, structure, and competitiveness. It is found that (1) the competitive effect exerts the biggest influence on export growth, followed by market size effects, with the effects of market distribution and product structure both being small; (2) wooden furniture, wooden products, plywood, paper, and its products play a main role in enhancing the competitive effect in China’s WFPs; and (3) China’s WFPs have a strong market competitiveness in other markets such as the USA, China Hong Kong, United Kingdom, Japan, Australia, Malaysia, and Singapore. Therefore, it is crucial for China’s WFP market to improve its product structure effects and market distribution effects in order for it to participate in international competition. On the other hand, considering that China’s exports of WFPs mainly consist of resource- and labor-intensive products, the improvement of standards such as the technology level, environmental protection and sustainable development, must not be ignored