State-owned forestry enterprises are important elements of the forestry economy in China. The operational efficiency of such enterprises depends on technological progress and other input factors. Total factor productivity (TFP) is an important means to evaluate the efficiency of technical elements. The growth of production efficiency can be classified into efficiency variation and technical variation. The TFP of 135 key state-owned forestry enterprises in the northeast, southwest, and northwest regions of China in 2001–2011 was measured through Malmquist–data envelopment analysis. The technological progress of the state-owned forestry enterprises positively affected TFP variation, but technical efficiency only slightly increased and scale efficiency even negatively affected TFP variation. The average growth rate of TFP in the northwest region is higher than those in the northeast and southwest regions. The Western Development Program of China increasingly contributes to the economic development of western areas. The increasing investment of the government in science and technology accelerates the development of forestry economy in China.

The trade of harvested wood products (HWPs) and their feedstock increasingly affects the dynamics of the complete national HWP carbon pool ignored by the Production Approach (PA), the current universal method, proposed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Existing research also overlooks the inherent factors that lead to the non-objectiveness of PA that affects the potential carbon trade and the sustainable use of forestry resources. This study aimed to investigate such inherent factors through a deductive derivation of PA and the Stock-Change Approach (SCA), based on which an empirical study on China was conducted to rethink the objectiveness of PA in the complete national HWP carbon pool. The deductive derivation indicated that the inherent factors rely on the balance between coefficients that describe the relationship between HWP trade and production and the relationship between the corresponding feedstock trade and production. The empirical study further illustrated that the dynamics of balance between coefficients negatively influence the objectiveness of PA. The absolute objectiveness of this approach was constantly weakened in the past 55 years and may potentially occur yet again in the future despite an improvement in its annual relative objectiveness.

Illegal logging, with its related trade of illegally harvested timber, is one of the main environmental and economic problems worldwide. Eliminating illegal timber consumption and production are two practical means to reduce illegal logging. However, the problem of determining which of the two means is more economical remains to be analyzed. In this study, an input–output analysis was conducted to evaluate the consumption and production of illegal timber in different countries. The Global Forest Products Model (GFPM) was employed to analyze the effects of eliminating illegal timber consumption and production on the added value of the forest sector at global and national levels. Results indicated that eliminating illegal timber production is more economical than eliminating consumption at the global level. The former is estimated to decrease the added value of the global forest sector only by 3.37% compared to 7.31% by the latter in 2030. Eliminating the production of illegal timber will result in uneven distribution of social wealth in the forest sector, and will pass the cost of reducing illegal logging onto developing countries. Developed countries would gain more added value and market scale than the global average, whereas developing countries would suffer a loss if illegal timber production is eliminated. Hence, developed countries are encouraged to provide financial support to help developing countries reduce illegal logging.

The carbon pool of harvested wood products (HWPs) is an essential part of the national greenhouse gas inventory. Developing a Tier-3 method for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Production Approach (PA) enhances the accuracy of HWP carbon balance assessments and removal estimates. This is crucial as the PA is a mandatory IPCC approach. A major challenge for developing a Tier-3 PA is the absence of an effective way to allocate HWP production to domestic and overseas end uses, precluding the application of Tier-3 PA in most countries in the world. Here, we integrated the Eora multi-regional input–output (MRIO) model, which effectively allocates HWPs to these end uses into the PA to create a generalizable Tier-3 PA. Using China-produced HWPs from 1990 to 2020 as a case study, we report that these HWPs accumulated a carbon stock of 3376 MtCO₂e by 2020 and provided a carbon sink of 221 MtCO₂e yr⁻¹ from 2016 to 2020. Construction, furniture, other solid HWPs, sanitary and household paper, and other paper products accumulated 1244, 226, 1032, 0, and 189 MtCO₂e, respectively. China’s trade partners consumed 14% of China-produced HWPs and contributed to 13% of the total carbon stock and 15% of the total carbon sink. The generalizable Tier-3 PA is applicable for countries with limited end-use data, and thus enhances their HWP carbon removal estimates. Our first-ever comprehensive PA-based assessment of overseas HWP consumption and carbon removal supports IPCC methodological improvement and future HWP-related international negotiations and mitigation actions.