Method of standardization of administrative costs of forest districts based on the management difficulty level

The article presents a method to standardize the administrative costs of forest districts using the management difficulty level index (STG). The scope of the study included the development of a revised structure of the STG for forest districts, comparison of the substantive and statistical factors that shape the level of administrative costs being incurred by forest districts with partial indicators that form the STG index, the development of the methods for determining the standard administrative costs of forest districts using the STG, and the selection of a method to be applied in the financial and economic practice of the State Forests. The source data for the administrative costs incurred by forest districts, as well as the data on the natural−forest conditions and annual economic tasks of the forest districts were obtained from the State Forests Information System databases for all the forests districts in Poland and from the Bureau for Forest Management and Geodesy. Information about the social environment of the forest districts was obtained from the Local Data Bank of the Central Statistical Office in Poland. In the methodological assumptions concerning the development of a method for shaping the level of administrative costs of the forest districts, two variants were adopted. The structuring of the STG for forest districts, as a tool to standardize administrative costs of forest districts, adopts the 'sum of relative values' method, where relative values of individual partial indicators (six simple and five complex ones) are obtained by dividing the absolute values of a specific indicator by the maximum value of this indicator for the whole population The obtained results of calculating the level of standard administrative costs of forest districts in two variants were similar. For the sake of clarity, simple mathematical formulas, and the ease of use by organizational units of the State Forests, the administrative cost standardization method based on the calculated average value of 1 item of the STG for forest districts per a given administrative cost group in the State Forests was used to build a makeshift of the State Forests plan for 2014−2016