Fire is an important land management tool for smallholders in the Brazilian Amazon. However, when fires are not properly controlled they can give rise to large-scale wildfires that threaten forests, agricultural plantations, and settlement areas. We use data from a survey of 220 households to...

We use data from a survey of 2401 households living along the Transamazon highway to study timber sales decisions of smallholders settling in Amazon native forests. We develop an econometric approach, to study both the decision to harvest timber and the volume of timber sold, that corrects for...

We use spatially efficient logit models to explore the role of economic incentives on the expansion of cropland in the Mato Grosso region between 2001 and 2004. An empirical measure for agricultural economic rent is used to quantify the desirability of a particular plot of land, which previous...

In the absence of access to formal credit, informal contracts with independent investors give the small ranchers of the Lower Amazon an acceptable means through which to surmount the high investment hurdle of starting a cattle herd. These contracts – called sociedades – allow small ranchers...

Summary Even in the absence of formal land markets, estimated values on agricultural frontiers of the Brazilian Amazon reflect the value-adding characteristics of the land. Understanding these characteristics provides important insights to the incentives (or dis-incentives) to protect tropical...

Estimates of natural resource harvests often inform rural conservation and development strategies. Retrospective household surveys remain one of the most commonly employed methods for estimating harvests. Pair-wise comparisons of estimates from household surveys versus diary records were...

This study contributes to the design of public policies for the forestry sector in Madre de Dios, Peru. We developed a timber rent model that estimates optimal stumpage fees and compared three scenarios of harvestable areas access versus two harvest methods to calculate potential revenues to the...

In this paper, we review the concept of forest sector industrialisation and technology adoption with the goal of identifying reasons that have shaped the technological development, or lack thereof, in the Brazilian forest sector. The image of the timber industry in the Amazon has been one of...