Does Land Tenure Insecurity Drive Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon?

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the detrimental impact of land tenure insecurity on deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. It is related to recent controversies about the detrimental impact of land laws on deforestation, which seem to legitimize land encroachments. The latter is mainly the result of land tenure insecurity which is a key characteristic of this region and results from a long history of interactions between rural social unrest and land reforms or land laws. A simple model is developed where strategic interactions between farmers lead to excessive deforestation. One of the empirical implications of the model is a positive relationship between land tenure insecurity and the extent of deforestation. The latter is tested on data from a panel of Brazilian Amazon municipalities. The negative effect of land tenure insecurity proxied by the number of squatters on deforestation is not rejected when estimations are controlled for the possible endogeneity of squatters. One of the main policy implications is that ex post legalizations of settlements must be accompanied by the enforcement of environmental obligations.deforestation, land tenure insecurity, squatters, Panel Data Analysis, Brazil

Property rights and deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon

This paper focuses on the impact of property rights insecurity on deforestation in the Brazilian Legal Amazon. Deforestation is considered as a risk management strategy: property rights insecurity reduces the present value of forests and fosters forest conversion into agricultural and pasture lands. Moreover, deforestation is the consequence of strategic interactions between landowners and squatters. Landowners clear the forest preventively in order to assert the productive use of land and to reduce the expropriation risk. Squatters invade land plots, clear the forest and may afterwards gain official recognition with formal property titles. A particular attention is paid to the measure of land property rights insecurity in the Brazilian context. It is assumed that property rights insecurity has a multidimensional character taken into account by the number of homicides related to land conflicts and expropriation procedures. Principal component analysis allows synthesising such information. An econometric model of deforestation is estimated on a panel dataset on the 1988-2000 period and the nine states of the Brazilian Legal Amazon. The hypothesis that insecure land property rights contribute to higher rates of deforestation is not rejected when the simultaneity bias between insecure property rights and deforestation is addressed. This result questions the modality of the Brazilian land reform that considers forested areas as unproductive and thus open for expropriation procedures.deforestation;insecure property rights;Brazilian Legal Amazon

Does Land Tenure Insecurity Drive Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon?

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the detrimental impact of land tenure insecurity on deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. It is related to recent controversies about the detrimental impact of land laws on deforestation, which seem to legitimize land encroachments. The latter is mainly the result of land tenure insecurity which is a key characteristic of this region and results from a long history of interactions between rural social unrest and land reforms or land laws. A simple model is developed where strategic interactions between farmers lead to excessive deforestation. One of the empirical implications of the model is a positive relationship between land tenure insecurity and the extent of deforestation. The latter is tested on data from a panel of Brazilian Amazon municipalities. The negative effect of land tenure insecurity proxied by the number of squatters on deforestation is not rejected when estimations are controlled for the possible endogeneity of squatters. One of the main policy implications is that ex post legalizations of settlements must be accompanied by the enforcement of environmental obligations.deforestation;land tenure insecurity;squatters;Panel Data Analysis;Brazil

Property rights and deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon

This paper focuses on the impact of property rights insecurity on deforestation in the Brazilian Legal Amazon. Deforestation is considered as a risk management strategy: property rights insecurity reduces the present value of forests and fosters forest conversion into agricultural and pasture lands. Moreover, deforestation is the consequence of strategic interactions between landowners and squatters. Landowners clear the forest preventively in order to assert the productive use of land and to reduce the expropriation risk. Squatters invade land plots, clear the forest and may afterwards gain official recognition with formal property titles. A particular attention is paid to the measure of land property rights insecurity in the Brazilian context. It is assumed that property rights insecurity has a multidimensional character taken into account by the number of homicides related to land conflicts and expropriation procedures. Principal component analysis allows synthesising such information. An econometric model of deforestation is estimated on a panel dataset on the 1988-2000 period and the nine states of the Brazilian Legal Amazon. The hypothesis that insecure land property rights contribute to higher rates of deforestation is not rejected when the simultaneity bias between insecure property rights and deforestation is addressed. This result questions the modality of the Brazilian land reform that considers forested areas as unproductive and thus open for expropriation procedures

Insécurité foncière et déforestation dans l'Amazonie brésilienne

We study the determinants of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. A particular attention is paid to the effects of tenure insecurity generated by poorly defined property rights. Tenure insecurity has a theoretical ambiguous effect on deforestation. On the one hand, it reduces agricultural profitability and thus discourages forest clearing that is considered as an agricultural investment. On the other hand, the Brazilian legislation grants property rights to squatters who make a beneficial use of land and thus encourages land owners and squatters to clear “unproductive” i.e. forested lands. Livestock activities also contribute to deforestation as they are less exposed than agricultural activities to tenure insecurity. The econometric approach of the effect of tenure insecurity on the Amazonian deforestation relies on a panel where temporal and individual heterogeneity are controlled for. Tenure insecurity that is measured by the number of rural murders is shown to have an unambiguous positive and significant effect on deforestation.

Roads & SDGs, tradeoffs and synergies: learning from Brazil's Amazon in distinguishing frontiers

To inform the search for SDG synergies in infrastructure provision, and to reduce SDG tradeoffs, the authors show that road impacts on Brazilian Amazon forests have varied significantly across settings. Forest loss varied predictably with prior development – both prior roads and prior deforestation – and in a spatial pattern suggesting a synergy between forests and urban growth in such frontiers. Examining multiple roads investments, the authors estimate impact for settings of high, medium and low prior roads and deforestation. Census-tract observations are numerous for each setting and reveal a pattern, not consistent with endogeneity, that confirms our predictions for this kind of frontier. Impacts are: low after relatively high prior development; larger for medium prior development, at the forest margin; then low again for low prior development. For the latter setting, the authors note that in such isolated areas, interactions with conservation policies influence forest impacts over time. These Amazonian results suggest 'SDG strategic' locations of infrastructure, an idea they suggest for other frontiers while highlighting differences in those frontiers and their SDG opportunities

Model evaluation and causality testing in short panels: the case of infrastructure provision and population growth in the Brazilian Amazon

In this paper we examine the relationship between infrastructure growth and population growth in the Amazon using a panel of 293 municipalities over the period from 1975 to 1985. Contemporaneous cross-section analysis confirms a strong positive correlation between infrastructure and urban population but does not indicate direction of causality. Thus, we employ a modified form of the traditional Granger causality tests to suit the short time series that we have available. Based on out-of-sample forecasting tests we conclude that the empirical evidence supports the hypothesis that growing urban populations lead to more infrastructure development, rather than vice versa

Does Land Tenure Insecurity Drive Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon?

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the detrimental impact of land tenure insecurity on deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. It is related to recent controversies about the detrimental impact of land laws on deforestation, which seem to legitimize land encroachments. The latter is mainly the result of land tenure insecurity which is a key characteristic of this region and results from a long history of interactions between rural social unrest and land reforms or land laws. A simple model is developed where strategic interactions between farmers lead to excessive deforestation. One of the empirical implications of the model is a positive relationship between land tenure insecurity and the extent of deforestation. The latter is tested on data from a panel of Brazilian Amazon municipalities. The negative effect of land tenure insecurity proxied by the number of squatters on deforestation is not rejected when estimations are controlled for the possible endogeneity of squatters. One of the main policy implications is that ex post legalizations of settlements must be accompanied by the enforcement of environmental obligations