Around 20 years ago, Tanzania adopted the policy of participatory forest management (PFM) to create incentives for increasing villagers’ participation in forest management. The timing is thus fitting to reflect on the achievements and challenges of the PFM process so far. There have certainly...

The enlargemenr of the Eu in 1995 with Austria, Finland and Sweden had a considerable effect on the Union's policy on forests, and there is reason to believe that further impact will arise from the enlargement in 2004 with ten Central and Eastern European countries. The present study aims at...

Economic optimization of silvicultural strategies is usually based maximization of (expected) present value, prices and costs being based on historical information. However, in some cases forest owners may have strong opinions regarding the character of future timber markets, conflicting with...

Selective logging operations in natural tropical forests often involve a very limited number of commercial tree species and if the density of these species is low, the number of trees felled may be only a few per ha. Consequently the costs of road and trail networks have a significant impact on...

Sustainability has several definitions within natural resource economics. Sustainable states may be economically or biologically determined. Age and age classes add complexity to any definition of forest sustainability. Here we focus on selected metrics that might be used to define forest...

This paper deals with rural households’ decision regarding tree planting on farmland in developing countries. This has been the topic of numerous descriptive socio-economic studies. In many cases the findings and claims of these studies are ambiguous, although there is a general agreement...

Based on interviews with 103 leaders of groups harvesting agarwood in various parts of Lao PDR we identify income determinants and prepare a typology of harvesters. There are three main groups of harvesters: [a] highly professional, migrant harvesters from Vietnam; [b] nonlocal, professional...

Rapid Rural Appraisal techniques are frequently used for wealth-ranking of households in rural communities. The main justifications of such approaches are that they are fast, allow prestratification of households in preparation for surveys and that they have been shown to have at least some...