Exploring the Business Demographics of Logging and Sawmill Companies in Post-Soviet Asian Russia

In-depth data on business development processes is required to understand the reasons behind productivity dynamics and economic trends. However, even basic demographic knowledge of Russian timber enterprises is often scarce, which severely limits opportunities for advanced economic research. This paper addresses this issue by introducing an open dataset on the business demographics of logging and sawn wood production companies in Asian Russia, an important center of the global forestry economy. To create an aggregated dataset containing registration and liquidation information from 1991 to 2024, we developed an approach to collect and process primary data on 9731 legal entities in the specified timber industries and Russian regions. This paper presents the periodization of the Russian timber market for the first time based on the obtained dataset. This periodization allows us to track the effects of significant changes in the business environment over the past 35 years. The analysis revealed a structural shift in 2016, due to the launch of the tax authorities’ policy of liquidating abandoned and shell companies. This led to an overestimation of the number of liquidations in official statistics. Our estimates of the liquidation rates for economically active timber companies from 2016 to 2024 are three to five times lower, highlighting the importance of using micro-level data for economic research. Our findings suggest that the crises of 2019–2020 and 2022–2024 had a greater impact on new entries than exits in the Asian Russian timber market. The largest forest companies have demonstrated resilience in the face of changes in the timber market, the pandemic crisis, and economic sanctions imposed on Russia, as evidenced by their low liquidation rates.