Estimating the tropical/temperate mix of European hardwood lumber imports

Attempts to document changes in European imports of tropical hardwood lumber are clouded by trade statistics that fail to fully disclose species identities. A recent examination of imports in six European Community (EC) member countries found that a wide range of imports; from non-EC-member countries and other EC-member countries were not classified as to species. Consequently, a species breakdown of imports based on known species alone fails to account for much of the import volume. Summarizing imports of known species from non-EC-member countries on the basis of country of origin provided nearly identical tropical/temperate mix ratios as did summaries of the actual species volumes themselves. Thus, country of origin would seem to be suitable for estimating the mix of unknown species imports. In contrast, using country of origin to estimate the tropical/temperate mix of unknown imports from other EC-member countries was unsuitable because of the large volume of re-exports of tropical species by other EC-member countries. Consequently, in this case, a range of possibilities was examined.

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