LARGE SCALE LAND INVESTMENTS AND FORESTS IN AFRICA

Caterina Conigliani, Nadia Cuffaro () and Giovanna D'Agostino

No 213, Departmental Working Papers of Economics - University 'Roma Tre' from Department of Economics - University Roma Tre

Abstract: Recent years have witnessed an increasing interest in land-based investments for food, feed, fuel and fiber, driven by volatility in commodity prices, economic growth of emerging economies, policy drivers of biofuel demand and investor strategies in the wake of the global economic crisis. This has led to a surge of foreign and local investments in developing countries, where land can be obtained at lower cost, and has led to fears of land grabbing. In this paper we consider the problem of identifying the determinants of large scale land acquisitions in Africa, and employ unilateral beta regression to explore the link between investments and a number of indicators related both to land supply and to institutional features. The results on the resource seeking nature of investments and on the impact of the land governance indicators are mostly in line with the findings of other studies; on the contrary, the results on forest land being a driver for large scale land acquisitions in Africa differ from previous findings, and indicate commercial pressure on African forests that may lead to accelerating degradation and deforestation.

Keywords: beta regression; foreign direct investments; land grabbing; large scale land acquisitions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F21 O13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 28
Date: 2016-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr, nep-agr, nep-env and nep-int
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dipeco.uniroma3.it/db/docs/WP%20213(1).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:rtr:wpaper:0213

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Departmental Working Papers of Economics - University 'Roma Tre' from Department of Economics - University Roma Tre Via Silvio d'Amico 77, - 00145 Rome Italy. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Telephone for information ().