Status and Structure of the Forest Industry in Siberia

The work presented in this paper deals with the cornerstone Forest Industry and Markets. More specifically it describes the system of the forest industry statistics in Russia and a rough description of the Siberian forest industry based on this data system

Carbon Budget of the Forest Industry of the Russian Federation: 1928-2012

A model was built for estimating the carbon stocks and fluxes generated by the production and consumption of forest products on the territory of the Russian Federation. The paper starts with the validation of a fiber flow scheme for 1990 using various Russian statistics. Forecasts a re made for 10 economic activities, which are important for the consumption of different forest products. The projection of fiber consumption (as roundwood equivalent) is based on assumptions of technological change in both production and final consumption. Consumption-induced fiber flows are traced back to the forest. A new decomposition function in introduced to allow for discrete approximations of nonlinear decomposition. Ten by five carbon pools are considered, which vary in their decomposition pattern. The mode was designed to allow full integration with models covering the rest of the carbon system. Results are provided on a regional basis for all 89 subjects of the Russian Federation. Due to the economic slump of the Russian forest sector, the accumulated sum of yearly deviations from 1990 fluxes are estimated to be some 1.3 billion tons carbon by 2012

Strategic Implications of eCommerce for Papermakers

It is expected that the paper and office products supply chain will move online in the very near future. The hubris of new eBusiness models has ended in a fragmented picture of a multitude of personal views relating to future developments on the eEconomy, eIndustry and eEnterprise levels. This paper endeavors to compile the currently existing knowledge in this field and to identify the basic drivers and inhibitors of the new economy that are of relevance to the forest industry. On the eEconomy level, acceleration in macro-economic growth can be expected due to efficiency and productivity improvements that are triggered by the elimination of information barriers thereby creating more efficient markets. On the eIndustry level, globally operating and more adaptive industry networks will improve economic performance by reaping economies of scale. Less volatile markets will result from improved planning and coordination thereby eliminating redundant capacities. An overly horizontally concentrated market structure might bear the danger of locking the paper industry in an underdevelopment trap of innovation exhaustion and organizational inertia. Business entities on the eEnterprise level will have to adopt the principles of openness, connectivity and strategic integration to fully benefit from networking and integration effects along the entire value chain. However a number of issues, such as sharing critical data in a networked economy, will increase demands for newly adapted business culture and management models

Global Change, Catastrophic Risks and Sustained Economic Growth: Model-based Analysis

This paper analyzes the effects of catastrophes on two types of regions referred to as developed and developing. Economic development of regions is measured in terms of gross domestic product (GDP) per capita and incomes are considered to be the main factor driving demand for ex-ante catastrophe management arrangements. We show that the same magnitude shocks affect regions differently. While a developed country has sufficient resources to cope with catastrophes, the developing may stagnate or even collapse without appropriate catastrophe mitigation measures or external aid that is needed only until sustained growth takes off. The analysis relies on a stochastic multiregional growth model that embeds mechanisms enabling the design of robust strategies ensuring sustained performance of regions under catastrophes at any time that they may occur. Resilience of regions is estimated with respect to the abundance of internal and external resources, e.g., capital labor and catastrophe fund, to adequately confront the shock and to maintain regional growth on a "satisfactory" level

Global Phosphorus Fertilizer Market and National Policies: A Case Study Revisiting the 2008 Price Peak

The commodity market super-cycle and food price crisis have been associated with rampant food insecurity and the Arab spring. A multitude of factors were identified as culprits for excessive volatility on the commodity markets. However, as it regards fertilizers, a clear attribution of market drivers explaining the emergence of extreme price events is still missing. In this paper, we provide a quantitative assessment of the price spike of the global phosphorus fertilizer market in 2008 focusing on diammonium phosphate (DAP). We find that fertilizer market policies in India, the largest global importer of phosphorus fertilizers and phosphate rock, turned out to be a major contributor to the global price spike. India doubled its import of P-fertilizer in 2008 at a time when prices doubled. The analysis of a wide set of factors pertinent to the 2008 price spike in phosphorus fertilizer market leads us to the discovery of a price spike magnification and triggering mechanisms. We find that the price spike was magnified on the one hand by protective trade measures of fertilizer suppliers leading to a 19% drop in global phosphate fertilizer export. On the other hand, the Indian fertilizer subsidy scheme led to farmers not adjusting their demand for fertilizer. The triggering mechanism appeared to be the Indian production outage of P-fertilizer resulting in the additional import demand for DAP in size of about 20% of annual global supply. The main conclusion is that these three factors have jointly caused the spike, underscoring the need for ex ante improvements in fertilizer market regulation on both national and international levels

The Economics of Including Carbon Sinks in Climate Change Policy- Evaluating the carbon supply curve through afforestation in Latin America

After the inclusion of carbon sinks in the Kyoto Protocol, greenhouse gas mitigation policies account for abatement measurements in both the energy and forestry sectors. This report deals with the development of a methodology for estimating cost-curves of carbon sequestration from afforestation activities and its combination with existing cost-curves of carbon abatement in the energy sector, with an application to the Latin American region. For deriving the carbon supply curves, a bottom-up approach is used where the costs of carbon sequestration are first estimated on individual grids (geo-referenced area of 50 W 50 km), which are aggregated in a single cost curve. In evaluating the carbon sequestration benefits of forests, we intend to capture the life-cycle of the sequestered carbon by accounting the carbon uptake during forest growth, the carbon emissions during the harvest periods, and the residual carbon storage in short-and long-lived products. From a number of model runs we show that (i) the cumulative carbon sequestration by 2010 could amount to about one fourth of the yearly emissions in the regions energy sector, given a carbon price of US$20/tC, (ii) the Latin American region on its own could fulfill the Kyoto Protocol demand on Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) sinks for 2008-2012 at a carbon price of US$26-32/tC, and (iii) when the supply curves of afforestation and energy are combined, the total emission reductions in 2010 are at least 15% larger than in the case of the energy sector alone. Sensitivity analysis shows that long-run projections are very sensitive to forest growth assumptions

Remeasuring the HDI by Data Envelopement Analysis

The measurement of human development has a potentially strong impact on how the development gap is viewed and on the formulation of new policies. Therefore correct and fair measurement is of great importance. In this paper, we develop an algorithm to compute comprehensive differentiation rules suitable for measuring human development. We used models from Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) literature to compare performance in a multiple output setting. The models were evaluated by empirically re-estimating the human development index (HDI). The most notable advantages of DEA models are that they endogenously construct a non-linearly arranged set of best practice countries and the weights of each indicator entering the HDI is endogenously determined based on an optimization calculus. These weights are allowed to vary thereby accounting for cross-sectional heterogeneity. While country clusters are identified by their similarity, some interesting outliers can also be singled out using DEA. Such outliers are either best practice frontier countries or countries that are locked in underdevelopment trap