Forest Tenures and Land Value in British Columbia Available to Purchase

Forest tenures are a set of complicated institutions that have played a significant role in the forest sector’s evolution in British Columbia. This paper analyzes the effect of forest tenure on land value. Various forms of tenure are briefly reviewed and a theoretical model of forest land value is developed. Data on forest tenure, forest cover, natural attributes of land, and others are used to test the proposition that variations in land value are related to forest tenure. The results show that government restrictions on tenures significantly decrease land value and that per hectare value of forest land under Timber License is only about 23-34 percent of fee-simple land.