Institutions, Economic Development, and Deforestation
Abstract
This paper offers a unified framework linking two important debates: First, the debate about the respective roles of geography and institutions on economic development; Second, the literature on the role of technological change and economic development on agricultural intensification and land use changes. We use this framework to study empirically deforestation patterns at the rainforest margin. To this end we specify an empirical model that can explore the causal chain ranging from geographic conditions via institutional change to economic development and deforestation. We estimate this model using a unique data set of villages at the rainforest margin in Indonesia. Our results show that geography-induced institutional change is the key driver of technological change in our villages. The bad news is that some of these processes along the causal chain seem to promote deforestation. The good news is that economic development, conditional on these effects, appears to reduce deforestation. --Download Info
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.Bibliographic Info
Paper provided by Verein für Socialpolitik, Research Committee Development Economics in its series Proceedings of the German Development Economics Conference, Frankfurt a.M. 2009 with number 18.Length:
Date of creation: 2009
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:zbw:gdec09:18
Contact details of provider:
Web page: http://www.ael.ethz.ch/
More information through EDIRC
Related research
Keywords:Find related papers by JEL classification:
- O1 - Economic Development, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development
- Q2 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Renewable Resources and Conservation
References
No references listed on IDEASYou can help add them by filling out this form.
Citations
Lists
This item is not listed on Wikipedia, on a reading list or among the top items on IDEAS.Statistics
Access and download statisticsCorrections
When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:zbw:gdec09:18For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (ZBW - German National Library of Economics).
If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.
If references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.
If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link to it, you can help with this form.
If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.
Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.