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Comment by thaumasiotes | Hacker News Reader

I don't get the relevance of "major cities grew rapidly". That can only mean that demand for wood spiked. There's no way it can cause local wood to become less competitive with imported wood.

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It sounds contradictory but it often does. When a part of the economy booms, it may make other parts of the economy less able to keep up because they cannot increase profitability at the same pace (so people will seek jobs with larger salaries, or investments will go different ways). Moreover, increase of demand can drive seeking cheaper sources of a product, which then overtakes the previous ones due to being cheaper (while before this increase due to regulations or lack of certain network/supply chain it may not have been possible or profitable enough to seek these sources).

It does: Cheap rural workers could get better paying jobs in the cities so wages increased in rural areas to

> There's no way it can cause local wood to become less competitive with imported wood.

But isn't that what we're seeing around the world? Be it cheaper labor, political control or whatever else, imported goods can be cheaper than locally produced goods.

Sure, imported goods can be cheaper than locally produced goods. But the locally produced goods don't suffer from the fact that their market is expanding!

If I had to guess - lumber costs might be dominated by labor costs? If they don't have guest worker programs it might not be cost effective anymore as wages go up

It required imported wood come what may, which opened up regulations and economies of scale that would have made importing wood expensive.

When you price in externalities (landslides, replanting, etc.), and others don't is easily turns the scale. Especially if others are selling illegally cut down trees... (Not alleging anybody in this specific case, but have some examples from my closer neighborhood)

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