J. D. Sauerländer's Verlag, Bad Orb

Due to an overall increase of wood consumption in Germany, Europe and worldwide, the sustainable mobilization of additional timber resources – especially in private and community forests – gained in importance during the last years. In the course of this study an extensive literature survey has been carried out, which proves that recent scientific and forest-political publications assume that an additional timber mobilization leads to the generation of new jobs in the forest and wood-based industries in an area. This paper investigates the validity of this assumption by comparing time series of the annually cut timber volume (Tab. 2) and employment development between 1999 and 2006 for the forestry sector, the sawmill industry and the wood-based panel industry (Tab. 3) in the federal states of North Rhine-Westphalia, Hesse, Brandenburg and Saxonia (Tab. 1). Applying a Pearson correlation analysis with a bilateral significance (Tab. 4), results show that despite the obvious increase of annually cut timber, a significant decrease in employment can be observed in all four federal states studied (Fig. 1). Hence additional logging does not induce a higher rate of employment in the studied regions. Beyond an additional timber mobilization it is thus essential to increase forest-political efforts to improve the competitiveness and general conditions in the forest and wood-based industries. Furthermore it is crucial to maintain the value added in the area in order to achieve positive employment effects.

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