Impact of China’s Natural Forest Commercial Logging Ban on the Export Quality of Woody Forest Products: Evidence from Wooden Furniture

The total commercial logging ban on natural forests is a critical regulation for ecological conservation and long-term sustainable development, while it generates substantial impacts on China’s forest product manufacturing sector. This policy has caused a drastic decline in domestic natural timber output, and inferior plantation timber further exacerbates raw material constraints, driving firms to increase reliance on international timber imports. This study employs trade data of China’s wooden furniture exported to 185 economies over 1996–2022 and divides the sample into groups based on the degree of natural log dependence across furniture products and constructs a grouped difference-in-differences (DID) model to empirically evaluate the impact of the comprehensive natural forest commercial logging ban on the export quality of wooden furniture. The empirical results show that the comprehensive natural forest commercial logging ban significantly inhibits the export quality upgrading of furniture products with high natural log dependence. This paper enriches the existing literature on the economic effects of forest conservation policies and offers decision-making references for advancing the coordinated high-quality development of natural forest protection and the wooden furniture industry.