Population, Income and Forest Growth: Management of Village Common Land in India (original) (raw)
A newly-assembled data set that combines national household survey data, census data and satellite images of land use in rural India over a 29-year period is used to obtain estimates of economic growth and population effects on forests, to identify the mechanisms by which these factors affect land use, and to address whether forest areas are efficiently managed where community land management is present. The evidence suggests that increases in the returns to alternative uses of land induced by agricultural technical change and population growth, combined with the difficulty of monitoring forest-resource extraction, are the major contributing factors to deforestation. *The research reported in this paper was supported in part by grants NIH HD33563 and NIH HD30907. We are grateful to Nauman Ilias and Joost Delaat for able research assistance and to two anonymous referees and Edward Glaeser for helpful comments. 9 This results depends importantly on the absence of dynamic effects of current forest use on future output over a long time period. The test can be generalized, however, to take into account different assumptions about saving and/or borrowing opportunities by replacing income with household expenditures as long as any uncertainty is resolved prior to the making of decisions. 10 Note that the signs of the income and family size effects on the demand for forest products are not known a priori, and must be estimated. Because firewood, for example, may be considered an inferior fuel, increases in income may result in lower demand for firewood. Similarly, increases in household size may increase or decrease demand depending on the extent to which firewood serves as a public good for household members as well as the price elasticity of demand for that commodity.
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