Oil, Macroeconomics, and Forests : Assessing the Linkages

Wunder, Sven ; Sunderlin, William D.

World Bank

关键词: ABANDONED AGRICULTURAL LANDS;    ABSORPTION;    AGGREGATE DEMAND;    AGRICULTURAL LAND;    AGRICULTURAL LANDS;   

DOI  :  10.1093/wbro/lkh018
RP-ID  :  76487

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

This article focuses mainly on the fiveprimary case study countries. For forest impacts, theconcentration is on forest conversion to other land uses anddeforestation, defined as a (temporary or permanent) removalof trees to less than 10 percent crown cover, which issimilar to the Food and Agricultural Organization's(FAO's) definition. Selective logging is thus notdeforestation but may degrade forests and enable conversion.All of the case study countries are tropical countries thatexport oil, a choice made for two reasons. First, themacroeconomic 'laboratory' of oil exporters offersa good opportunity to study links between external economicchanges and forests. Oil economies often fluctuatedramatically due to heavy reliance on a single exportcommodity with unstable world market prices. Second, earlierstudies provide support for the hypotheses that on averageoil- and mineral-exporting tropical countries have moreforests left and lose them at a slower rate thannon-mineral-exporting countries. The article briefly reviewshypotheses and methodologies and outlines the deforestationdata problems and how they were dealt with. It presentsempirical results for the five primary case study countriesand takes a closer look at three of the key causal linkagesin the model. It then examines the role of different policyinstruments and finally discusses policy insights thatextend beyond the oil exporting countries.