Influences of nonindustrial private forest landowners’ management priorities on the timber harvest decision—A case study in France

Recently, there has been a demand to increase the wood mobilisation from French private forests which are a significant part of the national wood supply. Nonindustrial private forest (NIPF) owners are frequently not only timber producers, but also providers of forest amenities, from which they derive a private utility as well as positive externalities for the rest of the society. This is often addressed as a limit to wood exploitation, since generally there is a trade-off between timber production and amenities. However, the forest property fragmentation and the passive management of some private forest owners are also considered as restraining the wood supply. We propose an econometric analysis of the harvesting decision with particular attention to the role of NIPF landowners’ management objectives. We defined four categories of management objectives: “production-oriented”, “production & amenities”, “amenities-oriented”, and “no objectives”, using a sample of 432 French NIPF landowners. The aim was to identify the relevant factors influencing the harvest decision, and, in particular, the role of amenities-oriented objectives and no-objectives. Results showed that a change in the management objective from production-oriented to amenities-oriented significantly reduced the probability of harvesting. The lack of management objectives as well as absenteeism, however, exhibited an even higher negative effect. Consistently with a utility maximisation framework, both economic variables (timber price and income) and landowners’ socio-demographic characteristics were significant predictors of the harvesting decision. From a policy viewpoint, our results suggest to address incentives schemes on passive forest owners in order to increase wood production.