Estimating the number of jobs created by chainsaw activities in Ghana

Chainsaw milling, a practice of using chainsaw machines to process trees to lumber, has been banned in Ghana for over ten years by Act 547 and LI 1649. In spite of this, the activity has been going on posing a real challenge to forest monitoring and sustainable forest management in Ghana. In order to be able to fully understand the social and economic impact of any policy intervention to deal with the issue, there is the need for policy makers to have a clear understanding of the scope of the problem, in terms of the number of people involved. The paper makes a contribution to this need by reviewing the various studies that have attempted and gives a current estimation. The paper draws mainly on two main approaches based on volume of illegal harvest and actual market stock volume of chainsaw lumber to estimate the number of people who engaged in chainsaw milling. The paper estimates that chainsaw milling directly employs nearly 97,000 people. The paper argues that using volume of chainsaw timber in reaching the
market and a production efficiency parameter based on ratio of lumber to tree volume rather than lumber to log/beam volume is a more credible approach.