Green gains from connectivity: highway expansion and forest quality

Xingjian Ding, Yumin Hu, Shilei Liu, Cong Peng, Jintao Xu, Mingzhi (Jimmy) Xu and Qinghua Zhang
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Mingzhi (Jimmy) Xu

CEP Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE

Abstract: Roads are often linked to deforestation in frontier settings, but their effects in managed forests are less well understood. We investigate the intensive-margin response of forest outcomes to roads using China's 2000-2010 expressway rollout as the setting. We construct a unique panel from the National Forest Inventory covering over 18,000 geo-located plots with ground-based measures of standing timber volume, which capture tree-level outcomes that satellite-based measures typically miss. Using long differences and standard instrumental variables, we find that moving 10 km closer to an expressway increases timber volume by approximately 2%, with gains concentrated within 1-20 km of new roads. The implied biomass increase equals 217-552 million tons of CO2, comparable to Canada's annual emissions at the upper bound. Mechanism evidence and a spatial equilibrium model show that improved downstream market access strengthens incentives for investment and specialization in forestry under strict forest land-use controls, highlighting a role for transport infrastructure in promoting sustainable growth.

Keywords: transportation infrastructure; climate change; forest; market access; labour specialisation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-03-17
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-cna, nep-env, nep-tre and nep-uep
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp2162.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cep:cepdps:dp2162

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEP Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().