Political Stability, Security of Tenure, and Natural Resource Conservation in Developing Countries

这个项目的目的是调查一个一般性的主张，即稳定的政治和法律体制是确保财产权的关键因素，而财产权是吸引对自然资源和环境资产的投资和保护所必需的。重点将放在发展中国家利用热带森林的方式上，主要目标是根据经验评估稳定的政治和法律机构对观察到的利用这些资源方式的措施的重要性。这项工作将首先发展一个理论框架，将保有权的不安全与私人资源所有者和公共资源管理者的保护激励联系起来。基于理论框架的实证分析将主要假设与两种替代假设进行比较，即热带森林砍伐和类似现象是由经济增长过程引起的，而这些结果的主要原因是人口压力。已经确定了主要数据来源，以提供实证工作所需的信息。这些来源提供了检验有关假设所需的三类数据：(1)发展中国家使用热带森林和其他自然资源的指标；（二）这些国家的法律和政治条件的措施；（三）社会经济情况。主要工作将集中在数据收集和探索性计量经济学分析上。

The purpose of this project is to investigate the general proposition that stable political and legal institutions are key ingredients for the secure property rights needed to induce investment in and conservation of natural resource and environmental assets. The focus of attention will be on the way tropical forests are used in developing countries and the primary goal is to assess, empirically, the importance of stable political and legal institutions to observed measures of the way these resources are used. This work will be carried out first by developing a theoretical framework that relates insecurity of tenure to the conservation incentives of private resource owners and public resource managers. Empirical analysis, based on the theoretical framework, will compare the principal hypothesis to two alternatives, that tropical deforestation and similar phenomena are caused by the process of economic growth, and that the primary cause of these outcomes is population pressure. Principal data sources have been identified to provide the information needed for the empirical work. These sources provide data of three types that are needed to examine the hypothesis of interest: (1) indicators of tropical forest and other natural resource use in developing countries; (2) measures of legal and political conditions in these countries; (3) information on social and economic conditions. Major effort will be directed to data collection and exploratory econometric analysis.