institutions and the environmental kuznets curve for deforestation a crosscountry analysis for latin america africa and asia abstract the relationship between deforestation and income across 66 countries of latin america africa and asia is examined institutional characteristics as well as macroeconomic policies of each country are hypothesized to impact deforestation results show strong evidence of an environmental kuznets curve ekc relationship between income and deforestation for all three continents institutional structure and macroeconomic policy significantly affect the tropical deforestation process improvements in political institutions and governance significantly reduce deforestation the factors leading to deforestation differ across regions however and there is no one size fits all global policy recommendation for restraining the tropical deforestation process

taking account of governance implications for land use dynamics food prices and trade patterns deforestation mainly caused by unsustainable agricultural expansion results in a loss of biodiversity and an increase in greenhouse gas emissions as well as impinges on local livelihoods countries governance performance particularly with respect to property rights security exerts significant impacts on land use patterns by affecting agricultural yield related technological investment and cropland expansion this study aims to incorporate governance factors into a recursive agro economic dynamic model to simulate governance impacts on land use patterns at the global scale due to the difficulties of including governance indicators directly into numerical models we use lending interest rates as discount rates to reflect risk accounting factors associated with different governance scenarios in addition to a reference scenario three scenarios with high low and mixed divergent discount rates are formed to represent weak strong and fragmented governance we find that weak governance leads to slower yield growth increased cropland expansion and associated deforestation mainly in latin america sub saharan africa south asia and southeast asia this is associated with increasing food prices particularly in sub saharan africa and southeast asia by contrast strong governance performance provides a stable political and economic situation which may bring down deforestation rates stimulate investment in agricultural technologies and induce fairly strong decreases in food prices

how can market mechanisms for forest environmental services help the poor preliminary lessons from latin america summary market mechanisms for forest environmental services are a new approach for conservation but there is also an increasing interest in the derived developmental benefits of these mechanisms we first propose a conceptual framework for future research on the livelihood impacts of environmental service markets we then review eight latin american case studies on carbon sequestration and watershed protection market initiatives finding positive local income effects in most cases more land tenure security and socioinstitutional strengthening in some cases but some negative effects also we recommend pro poor policy measures such as reducing smallholders transaction costs and removing inappropriate access restrictions

deforestation and the rule of law in a cross section of countries relationships between deforestation and population pressure income growth and insecure property rights are examined with data from 120 countries insecure property rights are hypothesized to arise from two sources government instability or inability to enforce ownership and an absence of government accountability the former source is captured by measures of general lawlessness such as guerrilla warfare revolution and frequent constitutional change the latter is proxied by variables indicating the type of government executive frequency of political purges and the existence of an elected legislature general support is indicated for the property rights hypothesis and for the effects of population growth

playing games in the forest state local conflicts of land appropriation this paper explores possible strategic interactions between the state and local community in games of tropical forestland appropriation three typical cases are discussed corresponding to a development over time of increased resource competition and market integration the local response to more state deforestation depends on the costs market and behavioral assumptions and less on the structure of the game cournot or stackelberg the state fuels local deforestation by providing infrastructure roads which reduces the net costs of agricultural expansion or when markets are imperfect and local behavior determined by survival needs the game structure is however important for total deforestation this paper explores possible strategic interactions between the state and local community in games of tropical forestland appropriation three typical cases are discussed corresponding to a development over time of increased resource competition and market integration the local response to more state deforestation depends on the costs market and behavioral assumptions and less on the structure of the game cournot or stackelberg the state fuels local deforestation by providing infrastructure roads which reduces the net costs of agricultural expansion or when markets are imperfect and local behavior determined by survival needs the game structure is however important for total deforestation

the impact of concentration and elasticity on line of business profitability abstract this paper explores the roles played by concentration and elasticity in a model of line of business profitability it concludes that the roles are conceptually distinguishable that concentration has a seperate effect on profit via the degree of collusion which is not eliminated by its dependence on elasticity and that assertions about a bias due to the exclusion of elasticity are based on incomplete theoretical foundations

deforestation in the brazilian amazon comparing the impacts of macroeconomic shocks land tenure and technological change the paper examines the current relevance of the set of variables reported in the literature as driving deforestation in the brazilian amazon the analysis uses a computable general equilibrium cge model adapted to capture regional economic structures and the environmental processes specific to tropical areas the paper compares the impact on deforestation in the brazilian amazon of changes in real exchange rate modifications in agricultural tax and support policies reductions in transportation costs arising from investment in infrastructure in the amazon changes in land tenure regimes and technological change in agriculture affecting productivity and agronomic sustainability

understanding environmental policy preferences new evidence from brazil we examine the relationship between socio economic factors and public opinion on environmental policies in brazil drawing on a survey conducted in june 2012 there are few systematic studies of the determinants of environmental preferences in emerging economies and brazil is a particularly interesting case because of its democratic political system rapid economic growth and importance for the global environment in general we find that the brazilian public is highly supportive of environmental protection to explain variation in environmental preferences we focus on the effects of income and education many previous studies suggest that both should have positive effects but the empirical evidence is mixed indeed we find that income has no effect on environmental preferences however education is a strong predictor of environmental preferences while college education is not necessary for environmental awareness there is a large difference between brazilians with primary and secondary education for policy the findings imply that investment in secondary education can raise environmental awareness regardless of income levels

brazilian policies that encourage deforestation in the amazon this paper shows that general tax policies special tax incentives the rules of land allocation and the agricultural credit system all accelerate deforestation in the amazon these policies increase the size of land holdings and reduce the chances of the poor to become farmers the following are the key provisions i the virtual exemption of agricultural income from income taxation makes agriculture a tax shelter ii rules of public land allocation provide incentives for deforestation because the rules used in determining the security of a claim and its land area encourage land clearing iii the progressive land tax contains provisions that encourage the conversion of forest to crop land or pasture iv the tax credit scheme aimed toward corporate livestock ranches subsidizes inefficient ranches established on cleared forest land and v subsidized credit is available for sudam approved ranches

land markets property rights and deforestation insights from indonesia summary we examine the emergence of land markets and their effects on forest land appropriation by farm households in jambi province sumatra using micro level data covering land use and land transactions for a period of more than 20 years 1992 2015 based on a theoretical model of land acquisition by a heterogeneous farming population different hypotheses are developed and empirically tested farm households involved in forest land appropriation differ from those involved in land market purchases in terms of migration status and other socioeconomic characteristics in principle these differences provide opportunities for market induced deforestation however the appropriated forest land is not extensively traded which we attribute to the lack of de jure property right protection and the resulting undervaluation in the market while the de facto property right protection under customary law provides sufficient security within the village community the sense of external tenure security is low when the land cannot be formally titled clearing forests for trading in the land market is therefore financially less lucrative for farm households than engaging in own cultivation of plantation crops such as oil palm and rubber we conclude that land markets did not have significant effects on deforestation on the other hand the emergence of land markets alone has also not been able to deter forest appropriation by local farm households

property rights and deforestation in the brazilian amazon this paper focuses on the impact of property rights insecurity on deforestation in the brazilian legal amazon deforestation is considered as a risk management strategy property rights insecurity reduces the present value of forests and fosters forest conversion into agricultural and pasture lands moreover deforestation is the consequence of strategic interactions between landowners and squatters landowners clear the forest preventively in order to assert the productive use of land and to reduce the expropriation risk squatters invade land plots clear the forest and may afterwards gain official recognition with formal property titles a particular attention is paid to the measure of land property rights insecurity in the brazilian context it is assumed that property rights insecurity has a multidimensional character taken into account by the number of homicides related to land conflicts and expropriation procedures principal component analysis allows synthesising such information an econometric model of deforestation is estimated on a panel dataset on the 1988 2000 period and the nine states of the brazilian legal amazon the hypothesis that insecure land property rights contribute to higher rates of deforestation is not rejected when the simultaneity bias between insecure property rights and deforestation is addressed this result questions the modality of the brazilian land reform that considers forested areas as unproductive and thus open for expropriation procedures

the interaction of population growth and environmental quality an important question for policy is whether holding constant per capita income and other relevant factors population pressures have a significant effect upon environmental degradation the authors examine the effect of population pressures upon deforestation in 64 developing countries in an attempt to provide relevant empirical findings data on deforestation were drawn from the food and agriculture organizations production yearbook results suggest that a relationship exists between per capita income and deforestation and that for africa rural population density shifts the relationship upward the increase in the rate of deforestation levels off as income increases the rate of growth in per capita income also has a significant negative impact upon deforestation although the magnitude of the effect is small the authors close in stressing that reducing the rate of population growth is not necessarily the best way to reduce the rate of deforestation deforestation in developing countries is really a problem of market failure since property rights are often neither defined nor enforced there is essentially no private cost of deforestation with no long term stake in the land people have no incentive to use land efficiently this situation must be addressed in conjunction with the problems of poverty and population growth

learning to cooperate stochastic and tacit collusion in social exchange the prisoner s dilemma formalizes the social trap that arises when individually rational choices aggregate with mutually undesirable consequences the game theoretic solution centers on the opportunity for tacit collusion in repeated play however not all actors grasp the strategic implications of future interaction accordingly this study reformulates the game as a stochastic learning model in which the behavior of interdependent actors is constinually shaped by sanctions and cues generated by their interaction computer simulations of a two person game show that adaptive actors are led into a social trap more readily than are fully rational actors but they are also better at finding their way out prosocial norms appear to be a consequence rather than cause of cooperation but useful in promoting forgiveness of random deviance the model is then elaborated as an n way prisoner s dilemma simulations show how the effects of network size density mobility and anonymity derive from a fundamental princi

re election incentives and deforestation cycles in the brazilian amazon abstract despite expansive research on amazonian deforestation and its drivers the role of local politics is not well understood using a panel data set that combines municipal level deforestation and election data from 2002 to 2012 i estimate the effect of an incumbent mayor running for re election on deforestation rates in election periods i find that deforestation rates increase 8 10 in election years when an incumbent mayor runs for re election an amount equivalent to four percent of the total forest lost since the 2004 elections electoral deforestation cycles do not appear to be driven by changes in agricultural policy implementation and activity but are linked to corruption and campaign finance suggesting that weak institutional constraints facilitate electoral manipulation of forest resources this phenomenon is not likely limited to amazonian forests re election incentives could very well lead to misallocation of other natural resources in alternate geographies

determinants of deforestation and the economics of protection an application to mexico we estimate the probability of deforestation at the plot level for chiapas and oaxaca two poor mexican states with high levels of biodiversity results highlight the importance of physio geographic endowments as well as policy variables and allow to test explicitly for aggregation bias they also suggest that if combined with information on the biodiversity value of specific plots such models could be of great relevance for policy by allowing to identify the ex ante risk of deforestation copyright 2002 oxford university press

market structure and price cost margins in a paper that has become a standard reference in the structure conductperformance approach to industrial economics cowling and waterson 1976 developed a theoretical rationale for expecting industry profitability to be positively correlated with the level of concentration their model based on a simple algebraic description of oligopoly behaviour has been interpreted as providing a justification for the common empirical practice of cross industry regression analysis of price cost margins in terms of concentration levels in the present paper we show that on further examination this model implies a joint determination of margins and concentration this provides some interesting comparative static results of relevance to inter industry differences in concentration levels equally however it leads to various cautionary insights concerning the meaning of price cost margin versus concentration regressions

can redd still become a market ruptured dependencies and market logics for emission reductions in brazil abstract during almost 20 years of political debate on the nature of payments for ecosystem services pes these schemes have been characterized mostly as a non market approach even though attempts to transform them into market instruments has persistently recurred in these debates one notable example is the materialization of reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation redd in brazil where a sustainable development discourse dominates national forest governance at the expense of a carbon commodification discourse this research paper adopts a foucauldian approach to plot the epistemological foundations of the market logics that still influence redd institutionalization in brazil to a large extent and thereby reproduce what we define as a ruptured dependence on nature more specifically we recognize ruptured dependence in the three building blocks of market instruments namely singularization monetary valuation and appropriation our analysis shows that redd institutions have retained the singularization and monetary valuation of emission reductions even though the appropriation processes have rejected the possibility of exchange and instead emphasized the national ownership of emission reductions however appropriation remains a highly politicized process that is sensitive to criticism and open to calls for alternative approaches that are closer to ruptured dependence

ownership risk investment and the use of natural resources the effect of insecure ownership on ordinary investment and natural resource use is examined insecure ownership is postulated to depend on the type of government regime in power and the prevalence of political violence or instability the political determinants of economy wide investment are estimated from cross country data and the results are used to form an index of ownership security when introduced into empirical models of natural resource use this index has a significant and quantitatively important effect on the use of forests and petroleum contrary to conventional wisdom ownership risk slows resource use in some circumstances

economic growth and the rise of forests although forests have diminished globally over the past 400 years forest cover has increased in some areas including india in the last two decades aggregate time series evidence on forest growth rates and income growth across countries and within india and a newly assembled data set that combines national household survey data census data and satellite images of land use in rural india at the village level over a 29 year period are used to explore the hypothesis that increases in the demand for forest products associated with income and population growth lead to forest growth the evidence is consistent with this hypothesis which also shows that neither the expansion of agricultural productivity nor rising wages in india increased local forest cover

deforestation land use and property rights empirical evidence from darien panama economic conventional wisdom suggests that providing land users with more secure property rights will result in more sustainable land use and less deforestation in this paper we use spatial econometric techniques to evaluate quantitatively the effect on land use of designated property rights in three parts of darie n province a national park where no human activity is supposed to occur and two reserves for indigenous peoples results suggest that legal property rights for an indigenous population can influence land use geography appears to be more important than legal protection for the national park

deforestation and the environmental kuznets curve an institutional perspective institutions for secure property rights and better environmental policies for moving the system towards a sustainable growth path can reduce the height of an environmental kuznets curve ekc relationship between income and deforestation this study examines the impact of these specific institutional factors on the ekc relationship for deforestation across latin american african and asian countries the factors related to agricultural production population economy and governmental policies of each country are hypothesised to affect deforestation results of the latin american countries show significant evidence of an ekc relationship for deforestation and also relevance of the institutional factors to reduce the rate of deforestation improvements in institutions for secure property rights and better environmental policies can thus significantly reduce the rate of deforestation without hindering the level of economic growth evidence also suggests that the effect of agricultural production on deforestation could be halted by strengthening institutional factors there was found to be complementarity between the institutional factors and forest sector polices and an additive effect between the institutional factors and forest products export promotion policies which could also eventually reduce the rate of deforestation

cooperation v rivalry price cost margins by line of business fl c bureau of economics working papers are preliminary materials circulated to stimulate discussion and critical comment all data contained in them are in the public domain this includes information obtained by the commission which has become part of public record the analyses and conclusions set forth are those of the authors and do not n essarily ref1 t the views of other members of the bureau of economics other commission staff or the commission itself upon request single copies of the paper will be provided references in publications to fit bureau of economics working papers by ffc economists other than acknowledgement by a writer tnat ne has access to such unpublished materials should be cleared with the author to prot t the tentative character of these papers

what has driven deforestation in developing countries since the 2000s evidence from new remote sensing data summary using newly released and globally available high resolution remote sensing data on forest loss we update the assessment of the cross country determinants of deforestation in developing countries we validate most of the major determinants found in the previous literature generally based on earlier time periods except for the role of institutional quality agricultural trade hitherto relatively neglected is found to be one of the main factors causing deforestation focusing on the effect of international trade we show that countries with different levels of relative forest cover react differently to a shock in agricultural exports value we also emphasize that taking countries development into account may be critical in assessing global deforestation trends the impact of trade is high in countries still endowed with a large proportion of forest cover while it is lower in countries with smaller remaining forest cover we finally estimate through a simple calibration exercise the requirements for a cost effective redd policy for compensating trade losses in an open economy exporting agricultural commodities and endowed with tropical forests we conclude that in a world with increasing global demand it might be costly to compensate totally and thus to offer the right incentives for developing countries to limit deforestation

explaining forest transitions the role of governance abstract we analyze how governance may influence competing land uses for forests and thus the occurrence of forest transitions across different low and middle income countries we develop a model of competing land uses that allows for governance to impact the risk of future versus current agricultural and forested land allocations the resulting hypothesis on the relationship between governance and the likelihood of a forest transition is then tested using cross country data the empirical analysis offers strong support for the competing land use framework and indicates that rule of law forest policy and regulatory quality influence forest transitions these findings inform not only the ongoing debate on forest transitions but also policy options for managing such transitions in developing economies

take what you can property rights contestability and conflict weak property rights are strongly associated with underdevelopment low state capacity and civil conflict in economic models of conflict outbreaks of violence require a prize that is both valuable and contestable this paper exploits spatial and temporal variation in the availability of land with title that is contestable by private actors to explore the relationship between in secure property rights and civil conflict in the brazilian amazon the results suggest that resolving this contestability of title at the local level could eliminate substantively all local land related violence but might increase conflict in areas where title remained contestable

the role of tenure security and private time preference in neotropical deforestation a survey of 209 chimane amerindian households in 18 villages in the bolivian rain forest was done to examine the role of tenure security and private time preference on the clearance of old growth forest results of tobit regressions suggest that conflict with abutters was associated with more deforestation but the average impatience of the household heads was associated with less deforestation results suggest that governments should protect the land rights of indigenous people if they wish to enhance conservation results cast doubts on the idea that high private time preference increases the depletion of natural resources

the structure performance relationship at the firm level abstract this letter provides an explanation for recent empirical results that suggest that market concentration has a negative effect on profitability at the firm level it also casts doubts on traditional interpretations of high market shares as evidence of market power

deforestation and the real exchange rate deforestation is a phenomenon that has largely been concentrated in the developing world we construct a theoretical model of deforestation that focuses on the factors affecting the incentives to transform forested land into agricultural land we show that i lower discount rates and stronger institutions decrease deforestation ii depreciations in the real exchange rate increase deforestation in developing countries whereas the opposite obtains in developed countries iii paradoxically better institutions may exacerbate the deleterious impact of depreciations in developing countries these hypotheses are tested on an annual sample of 101 countries over the 1961 1988 period and are not rejected by the data our results suggest that short term macroeconomic policy institutional factors and the interaction between the two are potentially important determinants of environmental outcomes