文章基本信息

标题：The Origins and Control of Forest Fires in the Tropics
本地全文：下载
作者：Clare Balboni ; Robin Burgess ; Benjamin Olken 等
期刊名称：Distributional Analysis Publications
印刷版ISSN：1352-2469
出版年度：2021
卷号：2021
页码：1-45
语种：English
出版社：Suntory Toyota International Centres for Economics and Related Disciplines
摘要：Pigou (1920) pointed to "uncompensated damage done to surrounding woods by sparks from railway engines" as the canonical example of an environmental externality. We study a modern corollary - tropical forest fires used for land clearing - using 15 years of daily satellite data on fire hotspots across Indonesia. We examine how externalities affect the decision to use fire using the fact that fires are predictably more likely to spread on windy days, but the degree to which this is an externality depends on who owns surrounding land. We find firms overuse fire relative to a case where all spread risks were internalized. However, firms are partially sensitive to the risks of government punishment, which deters them from burning near protected forest or populated areas on particularly windy days. Counterfactuals suggest that if firms treated all surrounding land the way they treat land near populated areas, fires would be reduced by 80 percent.
关键词：externalities;indonesia;forest fires;deforestation;environment;remote sensing