Under the development path of green circular economy with the goal of “double carbon”, the highquality development of forestry economy is an important driving force for tapping the new momentum of green transformation of industrial structure. Based on panel data of 31 provinces in China from 2009 to 2018, this paper constructs a two-way fixed-effects model to explore the drivers of high-quality development of the forestry economy, using forestry economic output value as the explanatory variable. The study found that forestry protection efforts, average forestry salary levels, forestry employees, annual afforestation area, technology level and regional industrial structure significantly contributed to forestry economic development. Therefore, China should formulate targeted forestry development policies based on the drivers of the forestry economy, so as to support and ensure the quality development of the forestry economy.