The Twelfth Congress of the International Union of Forestry Research Organizations (IUFRO) held at Oxford, U. K., in 1956, was handicapped in its discussion of international problems in forest economics by the difficulty of translating various terms into different languages. Section 31 of IUFRO therefore constituted an expert group to work out a uniform terminology and to develop a classification of accounts. Members of this group were K. ABETZ, Chairman (Federal Republic of Germany), J. BECKING (Netherlands), W. CORMACK (United Kingdom), E. MELZER (Federal Republic of Germany), E. SAARI (Finland), H. TROMP (Switzerland), R. VINEY (France), H. BRABÄNDER (Federal Republic of Germany) and J. LAMMI (FAO).
This group first dealt with basic terminology and drew up definitions of several important terms of accountancy in English, French and German. It then made a classification of costs according to object accounts and produced a trilingual classification of values of production in a forestry enterprise. A third undertaking was a classification of accounts for forestry enterprises: two proposals in German by H. Brabänder were approved.
In 1961, the expert group presented its results to the IUFRO Congress in Vienna, which approved them and recommended their wide distribution.
In March 1963 a FAO/ECE Working Party on Forest and Forest Products Statistics held a fourth meeting at Geneva. It considered the IUFRO work on the accounting structure for individual enterprises and made suggestions for further statistical work on capital formation at the national level. It recommended that more detailed consideration should be given to
(a) the definition of fixed capital formation in forestry, in the context of the European Program for Statistics of Fixed Capital Formation of the Conference of European Statisticians;(b) the concept or concepts of fixed capital formation required for the needs of the forestry sector;
(c) the suitability of the IUFRO accounting system as a basis for estimating capital formation according to the concepts;
(d) the possibility of compiling comparable data on fixed capital formation in forestry on the basis of the accounting systems used by countries at present.
Among its other tasks, the FAO/ECE working party undertook to advise FAO on the structure of its next (1964) world forest inventory inquiry and on its present system of converting national forestry and forest products statistics to standard international units.
