The Political Economy of Deforestation in the Tropics

By Robin Burgess, Matthew C. Hansen, Benjamin A. Olken, Peter V. Potapov, Stefan Sieber. 2012

564 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Tropical deforestation accounts for almost one-fifth of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide and threatens the world's most diverse ecosystems. The prevalence of illegal forest extraction in the tropics suggests that understanding the incentives of local bureaucrats and politicians who enforce forest policy may be critical to combating tropical deforestation. We find support for this thesis using a novel satellite-based dataset that tracks annual changes in forest cover across eight years of institutional change in post-Soeharto Indonesia. Increases in the numbers of political jurisdictions are associated with increased deforestation and with lower prices in local wood markets, consistent with a model of Cournot competition between jurisdictions. We also show that illegal logging and rents from unevenly distributed oil and gas revenues are short run substitutes, but this effect disappears over time as political turnover occurs. The results illustrate how incentives faced by local government o¢ cials affect deforestation, and provide an example of how standard economic theories can explain illegal behavior.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Global and Planetary Change, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5b8f721042d694c2d82cab82a228362aefc7e311

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Citations in the corpus

Corruption in Developing Countries (2012, unknown): “A final example comes from Burgess et al (2011).”
Decentralization, Collusion, and Coal Mine Deaths (2017, unknown): “For example, using the case of deforestation in Indonesia, Burgess et al. (2012) document that local officials’ incentives affect the environment.”
Institutional Corruption and Election Fraud: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Afghanistan† (2015, background): “Despite weak electoral institutions, candidates and officials face some possibility of punishment for rigging.”
Is It a Crime to Produce Ecological Disorganization? Why Green Criminology and Political Economy Matter in the Analysis of Global Ecological Harms (2013, unknown): “That approach for explaining ecological disorganization has been employed widely in the ecological and economics literatures (Humphreys 2003; Clark et al. 2010; Jorgenson 2010; Jorgenson et al. 2010; Mbatu 2010; Jorgenson and Clark 2011; York et al. 2011; Burgess et al. 2012; Clark and Jorgenson 201”
Only One Tree from Each Seed? Environmental Effectiveness and Poverty Alleviation in Mexico's Payments for Ecosystem Services Program (2015, unknown): “Economists have also relied on NDVI decreases to measure deforestation in previous research in both developed and developing countries (Foster and Rosenzweig 2003, Mansfield et al. 2005, Burgess et al. 2012).”
Watering Down Environmental Regulation in China* (2020, unknown): “More specifically, this paper also relates to a growing literature on the political economy of pollution (List and Sturm, 2006; Burgess et al., 2012; Kahn, Li, and Zhao, 2015; Lipscomb and Mobarak, 2017; Jia, 2017) by shedding light on how China’s environmental regulations are implemented at the loc”
The context of REDD+ in Indonesia: drivers, agents and institutions. (2012, background): “10 Indeed, deforestation rates are affected by local elections, with illegal logging increasing rapidly just before regional elections (Burgess et al. 2011).”
Does Economic Growth Reduce Corruption? Theory and Evidence from Vietnam (2013, unknown): “…crackdown across all industries would be absorbed by year effects and would not be a problem for our identification strategy; likewise, different average levels of corruption in different regions or industries would be absorbed in region-by-industry fixed effects and would not be a problem).”
The Impact of Fiscal and Political Decentralization on Local Public Investments in Indonesia (2017, unknown): “Burgess et al. (2011) show the presence of a strong local electoral cycle in illegal logging.”
Envirodevonomics: A Research Agenda for an Emerging Field (2015, background): “Indeed, a growing number of papers rely on satellite imagery to measure outcomes including pollution (Foster, Gutierrez, and Kumar 2009; Jayachandran 2009), deforestation (Burgess et al. 2012; AlixGarcia et al. 2013), and economic activity (Henderson, Storeygard, and Weil 2011).”