Abstract:

After the success of household contract management, the collective forest tenure reform has been implemented in order to allocate the forestlands to farmers with the very rights to use them, to deal with them and to make profit from them. Whether these changes can exert any effects on farmers’ harvesting behaviors or not has been tested in this paper. Based on data collected from Jiangxi Province in 2005 and 2010 respectively, Probit model was used to analyze how the collective forest tenure reform influences people’s cutting decisions, while FE and RE were used to test how the reform influences timber harvesting and bamboo yield. The empirical research reveals that the collective forest tenure reform does promote the actual timber production and bamboo yield. Furthermore, farmers would prefer to cut timber on forestlands with more specific property rights, while if farmers have the under-forest right of using non-timber resources, they would tend to delay timber harvesting. Thus, the conclusion of this paper is that ensuring all the timberland have certifications and large-scale management are necessary to promote timber products.

Key words: forest tenure, family-management, forestry-property certification, harvesting decision