Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
137157, 2004
2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved
Printed in Great Britain
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www.elsevier.com/locate/worlddev
doi:10.1016/j.worlddev.2003.07.005
1. INTRODUCTION
Recent research suggests three worrying
trends with regard to the role of natural
resources in long-term economic development
in Latin America. First, natural-resource commodity booms in the region appear to be
accompanied by declining GDP per capita.
This may be the result of a potential Dutch
disease eect; i.e., the impact of the boom is
to divert economic resources from more innovative, manufacturing sectors to less innovative, primary sectors. Second, rapid land use
changes are occurring in Latin America, characterized mainly by the conversion of tropical
forests and other natural habitat to agriculture.
Empirical evidence suggests however, that over
the long run agricultural land expansion may
be correlated with lower, rather than higher,
levels of GDP per capita. Finally, excessive
exploitation of land and natural resources
across the region is being promoted by policies
that distort land and resource markets, ineffective property rights and the failure to target
policies to improve the ecient and sustainable
management of natural resources.
This paper explores the economic determinants of these three key trends concerning
agricultural land expansion, resource booms
137
* Earlier
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WORLD DEVELOPMENT
Africa
Asia and Pacic
Latin America and
Caribbean
C. America and
Mexico
Caribbean
Trop. South
America
Total
Land area
(million
ha)
Forest cover
Annual
deforestation
198190
Estimated
annual deforestation
199120
1980
(million
ha)
1990
(million
ha)
Million ha
% per
annum
Million ha
% per
annum
2,236.1
892.1
1,650.1
568.6
349.6
992.2
527.6
310.6
918.1
4.1
3.9
7.4
0.7
1.2
0.8
5.3
2.5
4.3
1.0
0.8
0.5
239.6
79.2
68.1
1.1
1.5
0.97
1.4
69.0
1,341.6
48.3
864.6
47.1
802.9
0.1
6.2
0.3
0.7
)0.02
3.37
)0.1
0.4
4,778.3
1,910.4
1,756.3
15.4
0.8
12.2
0.7
Source: FAO (1993), except for estimated annual deforestation 19912000 (FAO, 2001).
139
140
Crop production
Sub-Saharan Africa
Near East and North Africa
East Asiaa
South Asia
Latin Americab
All developing countries
Source: FAO (1995).
a
Excludes China.
b
Includes the Caribbean.
Harvested land
Yields
Harvested area
Yields
Harvested area
Arable land
Cropping intensity
53
73
59
82
52
69
47
27
41
18
48
31
53
71
61
82
53
66
47
29
39
18
47
34
64
31
82
22
60
62
36
69
18
78
40
38
19902010
Percentage of
crop production
from new land
30
8
34
4
29
19
WORLD DEVELOPMENT
141
Cultivated crop
land in 1990
(1000 ha)
% of production
increase from new
land
Additional cultivated
land required in 2050
(1000 ha)
% of new lands
from forest and
wetland conversion
Africa
Asiaa
Latin America
Central Americab
South America
252,583
456,225
189,885
36,920
152,965
29
10
28
20
30
241,703
85,782
96,710
14,603
82,107
61
73
70
80
69
All developing
countries
899,795
21
424,194
66
142
WORLD DEVELOPMENT
oAD
< 0;
owLit
oAD
> 0;
oxit
oAD
> 0;
opit
3
tionship; (b) in the absence of adequate crosscountry data for the price and x variables in
Eqns. (2) and (3), the inclusion of the synthesis
model should include certain structural
variables sit , such as agricultural yield, cropland share of land area, agricultural export
share, and arable land per capita, to capture
country-by-country dierences in agricultural
sectors and land use patterns; and nally, (c)
from Eqn. (4) the inclusion of key institutional
factors thought to inuence land expansion and
deforestation.
Thus a possible model for a crosscountry
analysis of the possible eects of growth,
income per capita and other macroeconomic
factors on agricultural land expansion in
developing regions might look like:
Ait Ait1 AYit ; Yit2 ; sit ; zit ; qi ;
for country i at time t;
where Ait Ait1 represents expansion in agricultural land area, Yit is per capita income, sit is
a vector of structural variables, such as
agricultural yield, cropland share of land area,
agricultural export share, and arable land per
capita, and zit represents other exogenous
explanatory variables, such as population density or growth, GDP growth and other macroeconomic variables. Finally, as institutional
factors qi tend to be invariant with time, two
versions of the model can be tested, one without and one including qi .
Eqn. (5) was estimated through a panel
analysis of tropical agricultural land expansion
in Latin America over 196194, with the
dependent variable being the percentage annual
change in agricultural land area. 4 The EKC
variables Yit ; Yit2 are represented by gross
domestic product (GDP) per capita in constant
purchasing power parity (1987 $) and by GDP
per capita squared, respectively. The structural
variables sit are cereal yield, cropland share of
total land area, agricultural export share of
total merchandise exports and arable land per
capita. The additional explanatory variables
zit are population and GDP growth. The
source of data used for these variables was the
World Banks World Development Indicators,
which has the most extensive data set for key
land, agricultural and economic variables for
developing countries over the period of analysis.
Table 4 indicates the results for Latin
America both without institutional factors, qi ,
and with the inclusion of three institutional
143
144
WORLD DEVELOPMENT
Table 4. Panel analysis of agricultural land expansion in tropical Latin America, 196194
Dependent variable: agricultural land expansion
(% annual changea )
Elasticity estimatesb
Without institutional factors
(N 319)
)0.388
()0.109)
0.050
(0.036)
0.009
(0.127)
)0.734
()1.234)
)2.632
()2.028)*
5.565
(2.485)**
0.462
(2.098)*
)0.263
()0.163)
(N 233)
7.943
(2.595)**
)3.499
()2.328)*
)0.066
()0.862)
1.421
(2.271)*
)0.623
()0.929)
0.789
(2.343)*
0.383
(2.948)**
0.358
(0.83)
0.249
(0.345)
)0.363
()0.425)
0.494
(2.220)*
No
($17,359)
3.323**
11.23**
15.52*
Yes
($4,946)
Explanatory variables
GDP per capitac
(PPP, constant 1987 $)
GDP per capita squared
GDP growth
(% annual change)
Population growth
(% annual change)
Cereal yield
(kg per hectare)
Cropland share of land
(% of land area)
Agricultural export share
(% of merchandise exports)
Arable land per capita
(hectares per person)
Corruption index
(high 0, low 10)
Property rights index
(high 5, low 1)
Political stability index
(high 0, low 1)
Kuznets curve
(Turning point estimate)
F -test for pooled model
BreuschPagan (LM) test
Hausman test
DurbinWatson statistic
Adjusted R2
Preferred model
2.045
0.128
One-way xed eects
OLS
Mean for the sample without institutional factors is 0.75%; mean for the sample with institutional factors is 0.66%.
t-Ratios are indicated in parentheses.
c
Mean for the sample without institutional factors is $3,654; mean for the sample with institutional factors is $3,675.
PPP is purchase power parity.
*Signicant at 5% level.
**Signicant at 1% level.
b
145
146
WORLD DEVELOPMENT
expansion that beneted from economic distance from the rest of the world; and (c)
because of the quantities of resources that were
available combined with the large internal
markets for goods, increasing investment in
basic technologies for extracting and processing
natural resources was highly protable. As
Wright (1990, pp. 665 & 661) suggests: the
abundance of mineral resources, in other
words, was itself an outgrowth of Americas
technological progress, and in turn, American producer and consumer goods were often
specically designed for a resource-abundant
environment.
It is doubtful however that the unique circumstances that allowed the United States to
achieve congruence between intensive
resource use and basic processing and manufacturing technologies over 18791940, and
thus attain rapid economic expansion, are
applicable to resource-abundant developing
economies today. For one, after 1940, this
unique congruence had clearly ended for the
United States, largely due to changes in the
international economy, even though the United
States still had abundant resources. As Wright
(1990, p. 665) points out:
the country has not become resource poor relative to
others, but the unication of world commodity markets (through transportation cost reductions and elimination of trade barriers) has largely cut the link
between domestic resources and domestic industries. . .
To a degree, natural resources have become commodities rather than part of the factor endowment of individual countries.
147
invariably short-lived as the extra rents generated are eventually dissipated. Once the land
expansion and increased exploitation of new
resource reserves comes to an end, or poorer
quality land and resources are brought into
production, then some economic retrenchment
is inevitable. What we should therefore observe
is that economic development in a resourcedependent small open economy displays an
inherently boom and bust pattern.
Again, Brander and Taylor (1997) show that
a small, open and resource-abundant economy
that produces both a resource and a manufacturing good in the long run will have such a
pattern of development. That is, the economy
will experience early gains from trade, followed
by a period of declining utility. With the specic case of Latin America in mind, in which
raw materials are often inputs into semi-processed or processed exports, L
opez (1989) also
develops a two-good model of a resource-rich
open economy in which the open access
renewable resource serves as an input into an
enclave export processing sector. L
opez
shows that improvements in the terms of trade
increases the rate of open access resource
extraction and real income to increase in the
short-run, but inevitably permanent income
falls in the long run.
As argued throughout this paper, the classic
case of open access resource exploitation in
many developing countries is conversion of
forest to agriculture. If agricultural land
expansion in these small open economies is
associated with a boom and bust pattern of
economic development, then there are two
possible consequences. First, economies that
have increased their agricultural land base signicantly over the long run are likely to have
lower levels of GDP per capita then economies
that have tended to reduce their dependence on
agricultural land expansion. For the latter
countries, a shrinking agricultural land base
may be evidence that tradable manufacturing
and other dynamic sectors have become structurally more important in the economy relative
to natural resource sectors and that agriculture
itself has become a more capital-intensive,
productive and innovative sector. 10 Second,
for those countries that are dependent on
agricultural land expansion, further increases in
agricultural area will tend to produce only
modest increases in GDP per capita. Beyond a
certain point, additional increases in land
expansion will be associated with lower GDP
per capita, because of the boom and bust
148
WORLD DEVELOPMENT
Table 5. Panel analysis of per capita income and long run agricultural expansion, 196194
Dependent variable: GDP per capita (PPP, constant 1987 $)a
Parameter estimatesb
All countries
Latin America
Explanatory variables
(N 1; 135)
14,393.37
(23.69)**
(N 401)
11,525.92
(3.62)**
)24,293.31
()19.04)**
15,217.53
(11.182)**
)2,896.32
()6.59)**
)17,535.19
()2.55)**
12,156.88
(2.42)
)2,692.56
()2.20)**
168.01**
6,576.23**
6.85
0.368
151.13**
2,239.33**
1.68
0.145
a2it
a3it
F -test for pooled model
BreuschPagan (LM) test
Hausman test
Adjusted R2
Preferred model
a
Mean for all countries is $2,986, and for Latin America $3,675. PPP is purchase power parity.
t-Ratios are indicated in parentheses.
c
Mean for all countries is 1.18, and for Latin America 1.26.
*Signicant at 5% level.
**Signicant at 1% level.
b
149
GDP per
capita
(constant
1987 $)
16000
14000
12000
10000
8000
6000
4000
2000
0
0
0.5
1.18 1.26
1.5
2.5
All Tropical
Latin America
Figure 1. Projections of agricultural land expansion and GDP per capita in tropical countries, 196194.
150
WORLD DEVELOPMENT
151
152
WORLD DEVELOPMENT
153
154
WORLD DEVELOPMENT
NOTES
1. As a comparison, natural capital comprises only 5%
of wealth in North America, and 2% in the Pacic
OECD and Western Europe.
2. A major problem facing crosscountry analyses of
deforestation is the unreliability of any international
data set on forest cover, especially post-1990. The
United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization
(FAO), which has been the international agency responsible for compiling forest area data across all countries,
based its 1990 Global Forest Resource Assessment on
population growth projections in order to overcome an
inadequate forest database for some countries and
regions. This means that the FAO country forest cover
data are inappropriate for crosscountry analyses of
deforestation that use demographic factors as explanatory variables. This in turn means that crosscountry
analyses that employ the FAO forest cover data since
1990 and use demographic factors as explanatory
variables need to be treated with caution. An alternative
source of forest area data is the FAO Production
Yearbook. This includes data on forest, crop and
pasture land, but does not specify land area under
closed broadleaved forest. The data are drawn from
national government responses to surveys rather than
using primary data sources and are generally considered
to be less reliable than the Global Forest Resource
Assessment data. The inappropriateness of using the
FAO 1990 assessment based country forest cover estimates in crosscountry deforestation analyses has been
pointed out by Barbier and Burgess (1997, 2001),
Cropper and Griths (1994) and Deacon (1999). Given
the problems with recent FAO forest stock data highlighted above, some have argued that crosscountry
studies should concentrate on explaining agricultural
land expansion, Ait Ait1 rather than deforestation
across tropical countries (Barbier & Burgess, 2001).
3. Strictly speaking, deforestation is dened as (minus)
the percentage change in forested area, or
Fit1 Fit =Fit1 . Deforestation is however, clearly
related to the change in forest stock variable, Ft Ft1 ,
in Eqn. (1). In fact, various crosscountry analyses have
tended to use either specication as the dependent
variable to represent forest loss. To simplify notation,
Ft Ft1 is used in Eqn. (1) and subsequent equations as
a short-hand expression for deforestation.
4. Tropical countries are those countries with the
majority of their land mass lying between the tropics.
5. Including the three time-invariant institutional indices in a xed eects regression leads to collinear
11. The countries are Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Paraguay and
Uruguay.
155
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