The Construction and Deconstruction of a Norwegian Forest Industrial Regime 1980-2017

Bjørnar Sæther and Eivind Merok

PEGIS from Institute for Economic Geography and GIScience, Department of Socioeconomics, Vienna University of Economics and Business

Abstract: The evolving paths of natural resource-based industries, such as the forest industries, are volatile to new technologies and changing markets. The volatilities of a Norwegian forest industrial regime are studied in this paper. Private forest owners and two firms have been the key actors in the regime. Since the 1960s and until the early 2000s, these actors and the relations between them defined a national regime of forest industrial evolution. Financialization among forest owners combined with a strategy of debt financed global expansion within newsprint production at the turn of the century initiated the decline of the regime. Managers did not understand the growth of electronic media, and the consequences this would have on the previously successful business model of global capacity management. Lack of innovation and investments combined with cross border rescaling contributed to national deindustrialization of the forest industries. Norwegian pulpwood has become a precondition for continued Swedish forest industrial expansion. The materiality of logs being the basis for two interdependent industrial paths is highlighted as part of the reason behind this rescaling.

Keywords: forest industry; industrial regime; scale; Norway (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 34 pages
Date: 2019
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