ABSTRACT
Paul Samuelson’s classic, “Economics of Forestry in an Evolving Society”, was originally published in Economic Inquiry in 1976. It addressed an issue that has persisted in forestry for well over a century-the issue of the length of the optimal timber harvest rotation. As Samuelson notes, “there has been a tradition in forest management which claims that the goal of good policy is to have ‘sustained forest yield’ or even ‘maximum sustained yield’ somehow defined” (p. 466).
