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Cluster-based development of various economic sectors is associated with benefits, provided by participants' interaction and integration of different activities: ongoing, investment, innovation. Cooperation provides the total synergy effect, cost minimization, higher profitability of business processes. The paper presents findings of the research undertaken to study transformation of the northern countries' timber sector. The analysis of the northern countries' experience and economic growth programmes shows that their economic stability is based on rational use of natural resources, first and foremost on renewable forest resources, while the timber industry is a major taxpayer and budget contributor. Cluster development of the northern countries' timber sector with high investment provides for production stability and high valueadded timber exports. Results of the timber sector development in Sweden, Finland, Canada, where forests represent more than a half of the area, are given as arguments. Despite natural and geographical features, hindering the forest exploitation, Norway has programmes of the timber sector support and development as well. High results of the northern countries are mainly related to the cluster-based approach to the sector management, including the innovational timber cluster establishment. The cluster-based development of the northern countries' timber sector with high investment provides for production stability and high value-added timber export. The northern countries' success in the timber sector attracts the attention of Russian timber companies, which have actively been initiating clustering over the last five years. The development of timber sector clusters in Russia will secure their integration in the global transnational processes of timber product value creation. It will result in the innovation level for the Russian enterprises' engineering capability and facilities, access to modern management methods and competitive global markets

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Economic modeling allows studying the development trends of clusters and planning the introduction of control actions in this socio-economic system to achieve the necessary stabilization and development trends. The cluster can be described as a set of information about its elements and the relationships between them and can be represented as a graph, where the vertices are the agents, and the directed edges are connections between them. Cluster structural formations can be considered as social graphs containing information about heterogeneous factors and the relations between them. Complex structural modeling of the forest cluster allows creating a formal representation of the tasks of identifying the objects (socio-economic systems), analyzing their complexity, coherence, stability, and development scenarios. To do this, we applied the apparatus of discrete mathematics. Signed graphs make it possible to formally make forecasts of the development or trajectory of the simulated system in the phase space of its variables (factors) based on information about its structure and development programs by means of approximating them with pieces of trajectories of impulse processes in signed digraphs. Modeling with the help of the graph theory makes it possible to remove uncertainty associated with predicting the development of a complex system and to propose the option of controlling a stochastic process.