Current issue: 58(5)
Roundwood statistics are essential in a country such as Finland, where the roundwood market costitutes one of the most important internal markets. Determining the price level of roundwood can, however, be problematic due to the difficulty of the empirical determination. The main difficulties are the many timber assortments, quality differcences within a timber assortment, large variation of local prices due to variations in demand and harvesting conditions and in sales methods. The article discusses these problems from the perspective of composing a roundwood statistics for different timber assortments that would allow local and temporal comparison of the prices. It seems impossible to compose price statistics that could eliminate totally the variation in the material, transport conditions and demand fluctuations caused by technical development. However, one can suffice to a compromise that would eliminate the major disturbances and take into account other factors that are not related with market when studying the price series. In addition, the paper discusses methods for calculation of price indices.
The PDF includes a summary in Finnish.