Reliability and Integrity of Forest Sector Statistics—A Major Constraint to Effective Forest Policy in Russia

Abstract

Russia owns one-fifth of the world’s forest-covered area but has never been the leader of the global forest sector nor in gross output or relative productivity. The issues of the Russian forest sector have attracted research attention, but for many topics, this is still a green field on the map of sectoral studies. We developed a novel approach to understand the primary causes of the inefficiency of the Russian forest policy through the qualitative assessment of completeness and reliability of forest sector-related data. The main output of this paper is a thorough overview of the available sources of data with an assessment of their quality, completeness and reliability. We show that the Russian official forest sector statistics provide only basic indicators for very short periods with few observations being incomplete and inconsistent. Besides a critical analysis of the official statistics, we also discover some known, but still underemployed, resources of information on the Russian forest sector: textual information of official public bodies and companies, accounting records, remote-sensing data, etc. Finally, we discuss the possible ways to improve the data procurement of the forest sector in Russia to support future decision-making. We are convinced that a prerequisite for the implementation of effective forest policy in Russia is a significant expansion and improvement of the volume and quality of statistics on the dynamics of Russian forests and forest economy. Integration of existing and new data sources is necessary to achieve synergistic effects, both in terms of deepening the understanding of key business processes in the industry and in the sense of solving strategic tasks of its development.

Drivers of Spatial Heterogeneity in the Russian Forest Sector: A Multiple Factor Analysis

“…The 'Forestry' group contains the factual expenditures on the governmental forest management activities. The high degree of centralization of the authorities in Russia affects the quality of decision-making in the field of forestry [11]. Regions do not have either the credentials or the financial resources to maintain forests.…”

“…Reliability and integrity of the above-mentioned data were discussed in [11]. In this study, we employed data for all 85 Russian regions.…”

“…Nevertheless, the obvious fact is that the disproportions in regional trade patterns are only a consequence of the discrepancies in the endowment of general factors, such as forest area, labor, investment conditions and institutional mechanisms. In addition, it was concluded that there is a large amount of statistical data that is still not used in academic research or in policy-making issues [11].…”

Impacts of Energy Efficiency and Economic Growth on Air Pollutant Emissions: Evidence from Angara–Yenisey Siberia

“…The misreporting of environmental data is a common phenomenon and is widely studied in China [35,55]. Despite there being no statistically grounded evidence of systematic distortions of the official Russian environmental data, we assumed that the available data may also be affected by various kinds of intentional or accidental errors [46].…”

“…The lack of consistent and reliable data is a known problem when dealing with statistical studies in Russia [6,45,46]. However, the situation with environmental Russian statistical data is relatively more complicated, especially when downscaling studies to the regional or municipal level.…”