decrease and forests could increase. This accords with patterns of structural transformation and could be caused by improved transportation infrastructure (Asher and Novosad 2015; D. J. Kaczan 2016). This can happen when the manufacturing sector expands and may continue as the services sectors expand.

Thinking at the regional level, employing a general equilibrium perspective, transport improvements might themselves increase the pace of urbanization, facilitating migration to urban areas. This can also be part of increasing the relative productivity of manufacturing and services in urban areas versus agriculture, so land and population exit agricultural production in rural areas (Deng et al. 2011).

Moving to general equilibrium effects for the economy as a whole, more transportation infrastructure could increase the rate of economic growth. Country‐wide growth could lead to increased demand for agricultural commodities or timber, raising deforestation. Alternatively, growth could contribute to an EKC pattern, and a possible net reforestation, since the marginal impact of increased income is not the same at all points of economic development but instead appears to vary with food and natural scarcity.

Which of these mechanisms dominates in a particular setting and time period is an empirical question. With more information about a setting, we can speculate about the likely impacts of various forms of investments in transport infrastructure, including new transportation corridors and various upgrades.

# iii. Empirical Examples

The empirical literature on roads and forest cover on the whole, then, provides the opportunity to match cases to theoretical predictions. The following summaries review empirical studies by region, then raise the question (not sufficiently explored in the empirical literature) of the type of investment.

_Brazil_ : The Brazilian Amazon contains a significant share of the world’s primary forest and has attracted a high degree of attention from conservationists, including due to its extensive intact frontier landscape (Potapov et al. 2017). The literature about roads and deforestation in Latin America indicates that road building tends to raise deforestation in such settings and higher road density if anything raises land clearing, particularly for cattle production. As studies have suggested that deforestation impacts differ by pre‐existing clearing patterns (Pfaff et al. 2018), and road‐linked deforestation in some areas was lower than some expected (Chomitz and Thomas 2003), avoiding deforestation from investments seems likely to require both targeting of particular settings and complementary mitigation policies.

_India_ : Relative to Brazil, much of India is already characterized by forest‐agriculture mosaicland, with virtually no remaining intact forest landscape (Potapov et al. 2017). Studies of the Prime Minister’s Rural Road project have concluded that in this type of setting increasing the road network in rural India has resulted, on average, in roughly zero net deforestation (Asher, Garg, and Novosad 2017; D. J. Kaczan 2016). Heterogeneity analysis suggests net reforestation for densely populated agricultural areas (D. J. Kaczan 2016) with net deforestation for more distant and heavily forested regions. One mechanism that seems to at least in part explain the result for densely populated areas is labor reallocation, since road building is found to be linked to an increase in non‐agricultural employment (Asher and Novosad 2015).

_China_ : China also has a significant rural population living in what might be characterized as forest‐agriculture mosaicland and little intact forest landscape (Potapov et al. 2017). Deng et al. (2011) find that road connections in rural China, controlling for economic variables at the watershed level, are associated with net reforestation. The mechanism posited is labor migration, as roads in China tend to allow migration into swiftly growing industrial centers of production. Another element here is the high 15