Economy-wide effects of forestry development scenarios in rural Scotland

The paper investigates the economic impacts of alternative forestry development scenarios on the rural economy of Scotland. The projections of a forestry development model, concerning the planting, harvesting and wood-processing sectors up to the year 2050, are set as exogenous to a regionalised input–output table for rural Scotland, in order to calculate how changes in the output of these forest-related sectors affect other sectors in terms of output, income and market-related employment. Six future development scenarios are presented and applied under three alternative wood-usage assumptions. The impacts of exogenously set forestry output changes on the rural Scottish economy are found to be significant, especially if all additional timber is processed by regional wood processors.