The Dynamics of Household Land Use and Economic Welfare on the Amazon Frontier

该项目将通过在巴西亚马逊南部典型的“毁林弧”研究区收集第三轮面板数据，改进空间参照和新的家庭和个人跟踪系统，帮助了解亚马逊流域家庭土地使用和经济福利。研究人员将利用这一数据集来模拟森林砍伐与家庭福祉之间的关系，从而深入了解对保护政策也有影响的福利结果。虽然人们普遍认识到砍伐森林的全球和地方代价，但对作为主要代理人之一的小农户而言，砍伐森林的好处却不太清楚。 这部分是由于森林砍伐文献依赖横截面或汇总数据。家庭土地使用战略和生计实际上是在很长一段时间内同时确定的，反映了家庭和空间的异质性（有些未观察到）。因此，具有丰富的时间和空间维度的数据集和分析将提供最佳的政策指导。忽略这些动态或不确定性的分析可能会歪曲土地利用对经济福利和反向关系的影响的大小，意义，甚至方向：经济福利对森林砍伐的影响。新一轮的数据收集将增加空间数据的细节和额外的质量控制，以减少家庭的流失。被调查家庭的财产将有精确的地理参照，从而能够在决策者的范围内与遥感土地覆盖数据进行比较。建模方法将使用家庭生产框架，为理解研究区域在时间和空间上对大规模社会经济力量的反应提供理论基础。实证分析将侧重于一个同步模型，明确估计土地利用和福利的共同演变在家庭层面上使用面板估计技术。更广泛的影响：这笔赠款将继续和改善一个偏远，但环境和经济重要地区的小组调查。将特别关注并提供资源，用于创建一个调查登记册，按地段和住户维护该小组，跟踪已搬迁的住户和个人，收集详细的地理参考数据，并收集地面控制点，将遥感土地覆盖数据与调查数据联系起来。这些过程将为实证分析奠定基础，这些分析将导致期刊出版、会议演示、学生受益和长期小组的发展。更广泛的影响包括方法学贡献，例如量化减少自然减员的成本和收益，收集小组与回顾性数据，以及让学生有机会透过担任研究助理及由主要研究员教授的课程，在国际环境中学习应用研究。该项目由国际科学与工程美洲计划办公室，地理和区域科学计划以及经济计划共同支持。

This project will contribute to understanding household land use and economic welfare in the Amazon basin, through the collection of a third round of panel data with improved spatial referencing and a new system for tracking households and individuals, in a study area typical of the "arc of deforestation" across the southern Brazilian Amazon. The researchers will use this dataset to model the relationship between deforestation and household well being, thereby gaining insight on welfare outcomes that also have implications for conservation policies. While the global and local costs of deforestation are widely recognized, the benefits of deforestation for small farm households, who are among its principal agents, are less clearly understood. This is partly due to the deforestation literature's reliance on cross-sectional or aggregate data. Household land use strategies and livelihoods are actually simultaneously determined over long time periods and reflect heterogeneity (some unobserved) across households and space. Thus, data sets and analyses that are rich in both time and space dimensions will provide the best policy guidance. Analysis that ignores these dynamics or simultaneities may misrepresent the size, significance, and even direction of the effects of land use on economic welfare and on the reverse relationship: the impact of economic well being on deforestation.This project has the opportunity to address these gaps by building on an existing spatially referenced two-period panel of farm households. This new round of data collection will add detail to the spatial data and additional quality controls to reduce the attrition of households. Properties of surveyed households will be precisely geo-referenced, enabling comparisons with remotely sensed land cover data at the scale of the decision-maker. The modeling approach will use the household production framework, providing a theoretical basis for understanding responses to larger-scale socioeconomic forces as played out across time and space in the study region. The empirical analysis will focus on a simultaneous model that explicitly estimates the co-evolution of land use and welfare at the household level using panel estimation techniques. Broader Impacts: This grant will continue and improve a panel survey in a remote, but environmentally and economically significant region. Particular attention and resources will be dedicated to creating a survey registry to maintain the panel by lot and household, tracking households and individuals that have moved, gathering detailed geo-referenced data, and collecting ground control points to link remote sensing land cover data to survey data. These processes will lay the foundation for empirical analyses that will result in journal publications, conference presentations, benefits for students and the development of a long-term panel.Broader impacts include methodological contributions, such as quantifying the costs and benefits of reducing attrition and collecting panel versus retrospective data, and opportunities for students to learn about applied research in an international setting through participation as research assistants and courses taught by the principal investigators. This project is jointly supported by the Office of International Science and Engineering Americas Program, the Geography and Regional Sciences Program and the Economics Program.