Maybe you find the answer  in this book: "Trends of current status of the contribution of the forestry sector to national economies|"(http://www.fao.org/3/a-ad493e.pdf )

well, for traditional wood-products, the contribution can in general be assessed with reasonable precision, for example assessing FAOSTAT. However, for energy uses of wood, and even more so for other ecosystem services such as, e.g., berry picking, recreation, hunting, etc, it is much harder. Here one often needs to extrapolate the few data that can be found. FAO recently published a report on the comtribution of the forest sector to GDP, by the way.

Sorry, I only now saw that Eugen had given the URL to the FAO study.

Sir Eugen

FAO publication was really helpful. In reality, contribution of forestry employment and other services are not accounted in the developing world. As we believe that there are lot more forestry services present, those may be included as positive economies to the GDP calculation like the forest employment, amelioration services, climate change mitigation services and aesthetic services. Although, only value added assets are counted in the tropic;, in future, carbon credit and ecotourism will be included.

Calculation of GDP is based on the concept of "value added". This is defined as price minus cost of bought-in materials. Thus it is the contribution of labour and capital to the value of output. This calculation can be used to estimate the contribution of forestry to GDP, if suitable data are available.

Not always value addition method works, there may exist many hidden economies or diseconomies in the economy those are unable to be counted in a value addition method. That's why this question aroused.

You could probably find some info you need in an other FAO publication  State of the World's Forests 2014 "Enhancing the socioeconomic benefits from forests"

The parameters which are not directly related to the value added services (as mentioned : Aesthetics, Eco tourism, medicinal values etc.) are included by quantification of the ecosystem services. Though at a national level it would be a cumbersome job, but some scientists have tried to calculate the economic benefits (in terms of monetary values) by laying down the models of quantification of ecosystem services .

You can calculate the value of services provided by forests to a country from its GDP. This is looking at the GDP component "public spending" and how measuring money intended to conserve forests. The more money goes, the higher the value that this country has their forests. The idea is to calculate the value of ecosystem services of forests and when that value is increasingly high states earmarked more money to their protection by increasing the GDP.

This reasoning is explained in my doctoral thesis: http://oa.upm.es/105/

Interesting question. May see our report on Net Present Value of Forest Diversion in India that estimates the economic value of forest ecosystem services lost due to diversion. This looks at the contribution of India's forestry in GDP from another perspective.

http://goo.gl/K5QMTB

Dear Mr. Dhaval

Thank you for your contribution. Your accountability for NPV of forest ecosystem services were admissible.

One point should be noted that, there are some disturbances those may hamper accounting of GDP which I call environmental dis-economies, like disasters caused with great losses to the forest resources.

You may also have to include any subsidies or grant provided to the forest dwellers with any special consideration while calculating ecosystem services of the forests.

Thank you.

In accounting for the contribution of forests to GDP, it is important to look at it from three perspectives; 1. the incomes from wood/timber products like lumber, plywood, furniture parts etc, and 2. the incomes/contributions from non-timber/wood forest products including cane/rattan, bamboo, medicinal plants and shrubs, and bush meat. 3. charcoal and firewood produced by forest dwellers for sale should also be considered as part of the monetary contribution of forests to GDP.

However, it should be noted that the statistical service of any country needs to be consulted on the kind of formulae used in calculating each sector of its economy's contribution to GDP to ensure consistency with computations by the national institution.

Thank you.

"Accurately" is the key concept. What does 'accurately' mean? From who's perspective? For short or long term advantage?

To think the environment is a subset of our economy has lead to every environmental degradation world-wide. Reverence that nature is the master is the only path which will 'accurately' lead us to 'sustainability' that might be possible. However the greed and taking from the environment is clearly not sustainable when it's on the 'Industrial' scale. Only small scale  approaches with reverence will lead us back to the promised land. In my humble opinion.

Accuracy, yeah, or near about accuracy. That would be our target.

In a developing world perspective, targetting from below expected to moderate result of GDP calculation and then to an acceptable level of precision. Yes, the term accuracy is more heavenly, lets use precision.

For years, while calculating the contribution of forestry sector (goods and services) to GDP of any developing country, it takes negligible amount of contribution into consideration. This percentage would not exceed 2-5 percent. What we could call the excluded revenues extracted from forestry sector? is it be included in the black market? Thus, qualitative and quantitative provisioning in forestry production system need to be included. My humble opinion.

Kindly visit

 http://mospi.nic.in/GDP%2003.doc

for details one 'Measuring contribution of Informal Sector/Informal Employment to GDP' and you will find the answer.

that's what I was talking about...

http://unep.org/newscentre/Default.aspx?DocumentID=26802&ArticleID=34990&l=en