Trade liberalisation and global-scale forest transition

In this paper, we develop a new theoretical model that explains the forest transition not at a local, but at a worldwide level, in a trade liberalisation scenario. Our model has economic geography foundations: transport costs affect the distribution of firms between countries. We also introduce a renewable natural resource used as an input by manufacturing firms. The results reproduce forest transition behaviour but at a global scale: a decrease in transport costs has a negative effect on the worldwide stock of the natural resource in the short-term, but in the long-term this initial effect is reversed as a consequence of industrial reorganisation between countries because of the change in transport costs.