Optimizing the Wood Value Chain in Northern Norway Taking Into Account National and Regional Economic Trade-Offs

As a consequence of past decades of extensive afforestation in Norway, mature forest volumes are increasing. National forestry politics call for sustainable and efficient resource usage and for increased regional processing. Regional policies seek to provide good conditions for such industries to be...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Forests
Main Authors: Johansen, Ulf, Werner, Adrian, Nørstebø, Vibeke Stærkebye
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: MDPI 2017
Subjects:
Optimering
Optimization
Regionaløkonomi
Regional economics
Input-Output analyse
Input-Output Analysis
VDP::Matematikk og naturvitenskap: 400
VDP::Mathematics and natural scienses: 400
Norway
Northern Norway
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/11250/2474126
https://doi.org/10.3390/f8050172
Description
Summary:As a consequence of past decades of extensive afforestation in Norway, mature forest volumes are increasing. National forestry politics call for sustainable and efficient resource usage and for increased regional processing. Regional policies seek to provide good conditions for such industries to be competitive and to improve regional value creation. We demonstrate how methods from operations research and regional macro-economics may complement each other to support decision makers in this process. The operations research perspective is concerned with finding an optimally designed wood value chain and an aggregated planning of its operations, taking a holistic perspective on strategic-tactical level. Using Input-Output analysis methods based on statistics and survey data, regional macro-economics helps to estimate each industry actor’s value creation and impact on society beyond immediate value chain activities. Combining these approaches in a common mathematical optimization model, a balance can be struck between industry/business and regional political interests. For a realistic case study from the northern part of coastal Norway, we explore this balance from several perspectives, investigating value chain profits, economic ripple effects and regional resource usage. publishedVersion © 2017 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

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