Temporal and Spatial Modeling of Tropical Deforestation. A Survival Analysis Linking Satellite and Household Survey Data

Abstract

We estimate a spatially explicit model of the forest clearance process among smallholder farmers in an agricultural frontier of southern Mexico. Our analysis takes as its point of departure a simple utility-maximising model that suggests many possible determinants of deforestation in an economic evironment characterised by missing or thin markets Hypotheses from the model are tested on a data set that combines a time series of satellite imagery with data collected from a survey of farm households whose agricultural plots were georeferenced using a global postioning system (GPS). We implement a survival analysis to identify the effect of household explanatory variables on the probability of deforestation. This approach allows us to intorduce a measure of the time until clearance as a covariate, thereby afording a control for the effect of potentially important explanatory virables that vary through time but are not directly observable.