Tradeoffs between Rural Development Policies and Forest Protection: Spatially Explicit Modeling in the Central Highlands of Vietnam

Abstract

Alleviating rural poverty remains an important objective of development policy in many areas of the world. Traditional means of increasing rural livelihoods such as increased investments in agricultural intensification measures can have disastrous impacts on natural resources such as forests, by greatly increasing incentives for clearing. We use a spatially explicit model of land use in the Dak Lak province in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. Land use is modeled using a reduced-form multinomial logit model. Policy simulations demonstrate that the adoption of yield-increasing inputs requires concomitant forest protection policies, both in terms of forest area and of spatial configuration. (JEL Q23, R11)