Political Explanations for Deforestation
Sumber: nber.org
Tropical deforestation accounts for almost one-fifth of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide and threatens the world’s most diverse ecosystems.
To better understand why deforestation occurs, Robin Burgess, Matt Hansen, Ben Olken, Peter Potapov, and Stefanie Sieber analyze data on annual changes in forest cover during an eight- year period of institutional change in post-Suharto Indonesia.
They find that: increases in the numbers of political jurisdictions are associated with increased deforestation.
They also find that illegal logging increases dramatically in the years leading up to local elections, suggesting the presence of “political logging cycles”. And, illegal logging and rents from unevenly distributed oil and gas revenues are short run substitutes, but this effect dissapears over time as political turnover occurs.
The results illustrate how incentives faced by local government officials affect deforestation, and provide an example of how standard economic theories can explain illegal behavior.
Deforestasi di Kalimantan
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