Roads, Land Use, and Deforestation
研究了农村道路建设如何通过影响土地利用概率来促进森林砍伐，使用多分类逻辑模型分析伯利兹南部的数据，发现道路在土壤贫瘠和人口稀少地区可能造成双输局面。
Rural roads promote economic development, but they also facilitate deforestation. To explore this tradeoff, this article develops a spatially explicit model of land use and estimates probabilities of alternative land uses as a function of land characteristics and distance to market using a multinomial logit specification of this model. Controls are incorporated for the endogeneity of road placement. The model is applied to data for southern Belize, an area experiencing rapid expansion of both subsistence and commercial agriculture, using geographic information system (CIS) techniques to select sample points at 1 -kilometer intervals. Market access, land quality, and tenure status affect the probability of agricultural land use synergistically, having differential effects on the likelihood of commercial versus semisubsistence farming. The results suggest that road building in areas with agriculturally poor soils and low population densities may be a lose-lose proposition, causing habitat fragmentation an...