On Equilibrium Cycles and Normal Forests in Optimal Harvesting of Tree Vintages

摘要

A normal forest that has an even land allocation between tree vintages has traditionally been taken as a desirable long-run goal in forestry. In contrast, the presently favored eco- nomic hypothesis suggests that under positive discounting the optimal forest vintage structure typically evolves to a cycle without convergence toward the normal forest. This paper proves the existence of the cyclical solution and its global stability properties using elementary meth- ods. The occurrence of cycles in forest harvesting is given a resource economics interpretation. A numerical example that was previously analyzed incorrectly is clarified.