PROJECT OVERVIEW

Much of the controversy around the conversion of forests to pastures in the tropics centers around its purported relationship with poverty: does poverty cause deforestation or deforestation cause poverty? Answers to these questions have been largely unsatisfactory and incomplete because of reliance on cross-sectional or aggregate data and related econometric limitations.  This project seeks to address this issue and more general questions about deforestation and land use with a panel of survey and satellite data collected from households from an area typical of the ‘arc of deforestation’ across the southern Brazilian Amazon: the municipalities of Ouro Preto do Oeste, Rondônia.