Mobile phone adoption, deforestation, and agricultural land use in Uganda

Suhyun Jung and Martha Rogers

World Development, 2024, vol. 179, issue C

Abstract: Increased access to information technology changes economic opportunities and may indirectly lead to changes in rural households’ land use and the local natural environment. With the expansion of service coverage and decreasing cost of mobile phone service plans, particularly in Africa, it is critical to understand the implications of the rapid uptake of mobile phones on the environment. In this paper, we estimate the relationship between mobile phone adoption and deforestation in rural areas of Uganda over the 2009 to 2013 period. We exploit heterogeneity in household adoption of mobile phones using four rounds of the Uganda National Panel Survey (2009, 2010, 2011, and 2013). We find that a 1% increase in the share of households owning a mobile phone is associated with a 1.2% increase in deforestation within a 5-kilometer radius of these households. At the household level, those acquiring a mobile phone see an average of 8% increase in crop cultivation area, driven by households whose main source of income is not agricultural production. These results suggest that mobile phone adoption may lead to sizeable adverse impacts on the environment via an expansion of crop cultivation areas. The estimated increase in deforestation translates to approximately 16,000 tons of lost carbon storage over two years, valued between $3 and $11 million.

Keywords: Deforestation; Land use change; Information technology; Impact evaluation; Labor allocation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q23 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X24000883
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:wdevel:v:179:y:2024:i:c:s0305750x24000883

DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2024.106618

Access Statistics for this article

World Development is currently edited by O. T. Coomes

More articles in World Development from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().