Early Danish Contributions to Forest Economics Available to Purchase

Danishforest economists may claim some precedence with regard to the maximum soil rent theory in forestry (the German Bodenreinertragslehre), i.e. the problem of economic optimal forest rotation. As early as 1801, C.D.F. Reventlow outlined that the forest stand must return an incremental rent or otherwise be replaced. Reventlow estimated the present value of the return from the forest rotation, and as a consequence was the spokesman for early and heavy thinnings. A more developed theory on the problem of the forest rotation was presented by J.F. Hansen in 1852, i.e. before the German M.R. Pressler in 1858 made an attack on the prevalent German forest economics. In 1876, J.P. Gram developed and conceptualized Hansen’s theory, giving it a more simple and stringent form than that of the Pressler-Heyer-Judeich School. Gram realized that the problem of optimal rotation in forestry is an ordinary economic problem of profit maximization rather than a specific forest economic problem of maximizing the soil rent. Gram’s 1876 paper is a seminal outline of the development of forest resource economics later attributed to, e.g. findings of Swedish economists in the 1920s and American resource economists in the 1970s.