Abstract ID: 585

Road Investments, Their Contexts and Deforestation Impacts

This presentation will draw upon several papers, all using econometric impact estimation, concerning the impacts of road infrastructure investments on Amazon deforestation rates. Observational units are census tracts, much smaller than counties, for the Legal Amazon, with the forest data over time derived from spatially precise satellite measures of forest (noting that additional complementary analysis using pixel data will also be presented). The time period considered is 1976 through 2000, broken into three roughly equal parts. The temporal and spatial resolution of these data permits very useful empirical controls for factors which are not observed but are common to the census tracts within any county and also for factors which are not observed but that remain constant within a census tract. These are important features of the data given the critical heterogeneity across the basin. The central question is how the impact of new roads investments depends on the context. Specifically, we consider whether the effect on deforestation of new roads investments depends on how close they are to prior economic activity (prior roads or deforestation). Results of this type have implications for road location decisions which aim to consider both the impact of roads on economic activity and the impact of roads on deforestation. Preliminary results find that road impacts do vary significantly as a function of context. Additional preliminary work suggest that another impact of roads is yielding more roads, implying spatial path dependence in development relevant for long term spatial planning.

Session:  Public Policies and Sustainable Development - Development, conservation, and policy-making in Amazonia: contributions from scientific programs.

Presentation Type:  Oral