How to curb poverty-related deforestation?

ABSTRACT

Drawing upon recent data from the Southeast Asian Mekong region, I study poverty-related drivers of deforestation (logging) activities by rural households. I do not find an environmental Kuznets curve-type relation between income and deforestation. Albeit I find a negative relation between income and the deforestation probability, this relation turns insignificant once I take into account specific socio-economic household characteristics: better education, higher relative affluence, younger age, self-employment, a higher value of nonproductive assets owned by the household as well as affiliation to an ethnic majority significantly reduce the deforestation probability. Received credits, remittances or (public) transfers do not significantly affect the deforestation probability. This implies for development policy that pure income-increasing financial support does not suffice for curbing poverty-related deforestation. Fostering education, social status, doing business and private ownership of assets are more promising options.

KEYWORDS:

• Development
• deforestation
• environmental Kuznets curve
• education
• Southeast Asia

JEL CLASSIFICATIONS:

• C13
• O13
• O53
• Q23
• R23

Acknowledgements

I thank my colleagues and the enumerators involved in the data collection and preparation as well as Ulrike Grote, Hermann Waibel and the other scholars of the DFG project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ $ means PPP US dollars referring to the year 2005.

² Reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation.

³ Capital letters symbolize variables or vectors containing household data. 

⁴ The number of nonincome-generating people relative to the number of income-generating people in h.

Additional information

Funding

This work benefited from support by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [FOR 756].