EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

The Political Economy of Deforestation in the Tropics

Robin Burgess, Matthew Hansen, Benjamin Olken, Peter Potapov and Stefanie Sieber

The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2012, vol. 127, issue 4, 1707-1754

Abstract: Tropical deforestation accounts for almost one-fifth of greenhouse gas emissions and threatens the world's most diverse ecosystems. Much of this deforestation is driven by illegal logging. We use novel satellite data that tracks annual deforestation across eight years of Indonesian institutional change to examine how local officials' incentives affect deforestation. Increases in the number of political jurisdictions lead to increased deforestation and lower timber prices, consistent with Cournot competition between jurisdictions. Illegal logging and local oil and gas rents are short-run substitutes, but this effect disappears over time with political turnover. The results illustrate how local officials' incentives affect deforestation and show how standard economic theories can explain illegal behavior. Copyright 2012, Oxford University Press.

Date: 2012
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (201)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/qje/qjs034 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: The Political Economy of Deforestation in the Tropics (2012) Downloads
Working Paper: The Political Economy of Deforestation in the Tropics (2012) Downloads
Working Paper: The Political Economy of Deforestation in the Tropics (2012) Downloads
Working Paper: The Political Economy of Deforestation in the Tropics (2012) Downloads
Working Paper: The Political Economy of Deforestation in the Tropics (2011) Downloads
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:oup:qjecon:v:127:y:2012:i:4:p:1707-1754

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics is currently edited by Robert J. Barro, Lawrence F. Katz, Nathan Nunn, Andrei Shleifer and Stefanie Stantcheva

More articles in The Quarterly Journal of Economics from President and Fellows of Harvard College
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:oup:qjecon:v:127:y:2012:i:4:p:1707-1754