Convergence of Optimal Harvesting Policies to a Normal Forest

Terry Heaps ()
Additional contact information
Terry Heaps: Simon Fraser University, http://www.sfu.ca/~heaps

Discussion Papers from Department of Economics, Simon Fraser University

Abstract: This paper extends the forestry maximum principle of Heaps (1984) to allow the benefits of harvesting to be the utility of the volume of wood harvested as in Mitra - Wan (1985, 1986). Unlike those authors, however, time is treated as a continuous rather than as a discrete variable. Existence of an optimal harvesting policy is established. Then necessary conditions are derived for the extended model which are also sufficient. The conditions are used to show that uniformly bounded sequences of optimal harvesting policies contain subsequences which converge pointwise a.e. and in net present value to an optimal harvesting policy. This result is then used to show that any optimal logging policy must converge in harvesting age to a constant rotation period given by modified Faustmann formula. The associated age class distribution converges to a normal forest.

Keywords: optimal harvesting; multiple age classes; convergence (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C61 Q23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 67
Date: 2014-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sfu.ca/repec-econ/sfu/sfudps/dp14-01.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sfu:sfudps:dp14-01

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from Department of Economics, Simon Fraser University Department of Economics, Simon Fraser University, 8888 University Drive, Burnaby, BC, V5A 1S6, Canada. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Working Paper Coordinator ().