The impact of income, land, and wealth inequality on agricultural expansion in Latin America.

ABSTRACT: Agricultural expansion remains the most prominent proximate cause of tropical deforestation in Latin America, a region characterized by deforestation rates substantially above the world average and extremely high inequality. This paper deploys several multivariate statistical models to test whether different aspects of inequality, within a context of increasing agricultural productivity, promote agricultural expansion (Jevons paradox) or contraction (land-sparing) in 10 Latin American countries over 1990-2010. Here I show the existence of distinct patterns between the instantaneous and the overall (i.e., accounting for temporal lags) effect of increasing agricultural productivity, conditional on the degree of income, land, and wealth inequality. In a context of perfect equality, the instan

SUBMITTER: Ceddia MG 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6377487 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature