Forest Resource Economics and Finance.(Review)

by W. David Klemperer

New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1996, $62.91 cloth. 551pp.

The audience for this book is undergraduate forestry students and practicing foresters. It is written at a level that assumes a minimum background of high school algebra, elementary statistics, and one semester of microeconomics.

The book is divided into seventeen chapters but there is no grouping of chapters into larger divisions such as sections or parts. The introductory chapter begins by pointing out the aspects of forests and forestry that economists have argued make application of economic principles challenging; for example, the long time periods for timber production, the tree being both the means and the output of the timber production process, the wide range of outputs that can be produced simultaneously from forests, and the great potential for both positive and negative externalities associated with forest resource management and utilization. Klemperer argues that economics is a way of thinking about problems and issues, and illustrates the commonly understood, but narrow and incorrect, public perception of economics as involving only values measured in dollars with a quote from Aldo Leopold taken from A Sand County Almanac. Considering the esteem in which foresters and other natural resource specialists hold Leopold, this would seem to be dangerous …