Population, Land Use, and Environment Research Directions (2005) / Chapter Skim
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12 A Review of 10 Years of Work on Economic Growth and Population Change in Rural India--Andrew Foster
12 A Review of 10 Years of Work on Economic Growth and Population Change in Rural India--Andrew Foster
Pages 287-308
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From page 287... ...
I have organized the chapter into five sections. The first section addresses the role of theory in this work and gives particular consideration to the issue of how one establishes the presence of environmental externalities to population growth.
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From page 288... ...
words, "mediated by institutional factors and often overshadowed by pressures arising from changing market conditions." In the substantial economic literature concerned with the question of the efficiency with which common areas, such as forest areas, are managed in developing countries, however, there is surprisingly little discussion of the process by which forest area is chosen. The primary difficulty with this literature, with its emphasis on the tree management, is that it neglects factors determining the demand for forest products inclusive of population growth and does not allow for the possibility that forest area will be importantly determined by the relative returns to forest and other uses of land.
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From page 289... ...
Moreover, depending on the ability of households to substitute away from the use of environmental resources as they become more scarce, it has been argued that incentives for childbearing may actually increase with environmental degradation, yielding a vicious circle in which higher rates of environmental degradation promote higher population growth, and higher population growth increases environmental degradation (Nerlove, 1991)
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From page 290... ...
This was not done because we thought that this model would necessarily characterize forest land allocation, but because we thought a structure was needed within which one could isolate the different mechanisms that link population size, technology change, and forest cover. In particular, the model highlights how population and technological change affect both the demand for forest products and the cost of labor used to extract forest resources, suggesting an empirical approach that allows one to isolate these components.
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From page 291... ...
Thus a comparison of how household size affects the demand for forest products and how household size affects forest area, given equilibrium land prices, wages, household income, and the number of households, provides an indirect test of whether forest area is managed efficiently. Using this model as a starting point, we considered a number of alternative assumptions about the management of forest resources.
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From page 292... ...
At a lower level of analysis, those few detailed longitudinal maps of forest cover that exist have either little spatial heterogeneity or could not be linked to underlying representative household survey data. Our analysis uses a panel data set that covers a period of 30 years in a sample that is representative of rural India and can be linked to local-level measures of forest cover and thus addresses all of these issues.
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From page 293... ...
Thus underlying mechanisms relating agricultural productivity to forest cover are not likely to differ substantially across villages in the country. The survey data that formed the basis of the analysis consists of a 30year panel collected by the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER)
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At the early stages of the project, however, it became clear that this information was incomplete. In particular, the measure was restricted to the administrative area of the village rather than some fixed catchment area, and it was unclear whether the standards by which forest cover were being reported were comparable across areas, whether forest area included areas that were designated as forest reserves but did not necessarily have standing trees, and whether reported forest area included plantation forest.
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From page 295... ...
However, given the relatively diverse ecological variation across India and the number of images involved, we elected to use, as a basis for measuring forest density, a standard measure of vegetative cover, the Normalized Differentiated Vegetation Index (NDVI) (Rouse et al., 1974)
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From page 296... ...
Our first two rounds of satellite imagery also provided some evidence of increases in forest cover, but we largely ignored this given that we were primarily interested in differential change in forest cover across regions. We were also concerned that the differences in measured forest cover might reflect the differences in the satellite and storage medium of the first two rounds.
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From page 297... ...
The statistical analyses for this work consisted primarily of estimation of a series of equations relating forest cover at the village level to agricultural productivity, household size, population size, and measures of infrastructure. To account for unmeasured differences across villages in climatic conditions and biophysical constraints, we used fixed effects,6 relating changes over time in forest cover to changes over time in economic and population conditions.
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hRural Economic Development Survey, 1999. i National Climate Data Center, monthly global surface data.
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From page 299... ...
, where the opening of an agricultural commodity market resulted in a substantial transition from forest to crop land. Second, while there is some evidence that rural wages have risen in part as a consequence of growth in the nonfarm sector, there is no evidence that this rise in wages has importantly affected forest cover given household income, household size, and the returns to traditional agricultural land.
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From page 300... ...
But this overall pattern of effects, which is driven through the national demand for forest products, does not necessarily imply that population does not have important adverse effects on forest cover at the local level. In particular, our results suggest that population has a variety of effects on forest cover and that there is an important distinction to be made between population growth due to expansion of households and population growth
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From page 301... ...
These results suggest, as assumed in the baseline model, that local demand for forest products is met at least in part through local production, just as, at the national level, supply responds to demand. The fact that increases in household size have a different impact than do increases in the number of households suggests, in addition, that the organization of people into households affects the demand for forest products and thus forest area through scale effects.
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From page 302... ...
As a consequence of the second assumption, this unit cost varies from village to village. Given these two assumptions, and in the absence of direct measures of firewood price, the best way to measure the sensitivity of demand for forest products to income is through withinvillage variation in firewood consumption.
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From page 303... ...
In this case, the measured effect of the Green Revolution would only incorporate the production effect on forests and miss the fact that the Green Revolution in India may have helped, all else being equal, to lower world grain prices and thus decrease the incentive to convert forest land to agriculture. Finally, consider the argument that overall demand for paper and wood products in India was largely responsible for the growth in forest cover over the 30-year study period.
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From page 304... ...
The finding that, for example, increases in household size at the level of the village tend to result in decreases in forest cover does not at all imply that increases in household size at the national level will decrease forest cover. To the extent that forest growth is driven by demand for paper products, a relatively tradable good, population growth at the national level may increase forest cover in a relatively closed economy.
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From page 305... ...
Given that the survey data that provided the starting point for our analysis did not contain detailed information on forest cover, the unique temporal frame of our study could not have been possible had we not been able to integrate into the analysis previously collected remotely sensed data. At the same time, however, the earliest remotely sensed images were of a different quality and in a different medium than those collected in more recent years.
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Cropper, M., and C Griffiths 1984 The interaction of population growth and environmental quality.
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1985 Population growth and the decline of common property resources in India. Popula tion and Development Review 11(33)
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1999 Rural Population Growth, Agricultural Change and Natural Resource Manage ment in Developing Countries: A Review of Hypotheses and Some Evidence from Honduras. (Discussion Paper 48.)
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