Analysis of the characteristics of China’s forestry industry upgrading by product space theory

Forestry industry upgrading plays a crucial role in forestry modernization and high-quality development. Based on product space theory, this paper applies the clustering heat maps and the complex network methods to construct the product space of China’s forestry industry to analyze the characteristics of it from 1962 to 2017. Results show that the newly acquired forest products have a high complexity of 0.31 and the traditional forest product have a low complexity of -0.21, indicating that the forestry industry has been upgraded in a favorable direction with higher added value. However, the traditional forest product shows the existing competitive products in the forestry industry are extremely competitive, which is not conducive to upgrading. The potentially advantageous forest products with higher product complexity are forestry machinery, mechanical parts, and forestry products. The change of advantageous forest product has a path dependence: expanding first and then concentrating to the center of the product space. Therefore, this paper suggests to form different forestry policies based on the different advantage characteristics of the specific forest, to improve the market exit mechanism for the traditional advantageous forest, to reduce potential policy interventions for potential advantage forest products that are closer to advantageous forest products, and to subsidize and to guide the upgrading of the forest products with a long-distance and high potential complexity.