The pandemic continues, but the worst of the health impacts appear to be passing. It is timely to turn attention to the economy and the role of essential industries like forestry and wood products in sustaining economic activity in Australia.
As the industry came to understand in the rapid evolution of the pandemic and the immediate response to it, the essential characteristic of our industry to the Australian economy cannot be taken for granted.
Had the industry faced a four-week close down, IndustryEdge’s headline assessment is that the impact on the value of sales alone would have been in the vicinity of $2.5 billion, inclusive of a disrupted re-start.
In that context, the continued operation of the forestry and wood products industry during the pandemic is clearly a credit to all concerned, and a testament to the industry’s real importance to the national economy.
Here we set out the details of the analysis.
The IndustryEdge report can be viewed and downloaded here: The value of being ‘essential’ – some metrics_May ’20