Roads, land use, and deforestation: A spatial model applied to Belize
Rural roads promote economic development, but they also facilitate deforestation.
To explore this tradeoff, this article develops a spatially explicit model of land use
and estimates probabilities of alternative land uses as a function of land characteristics
and distance to market using a multinomial logit specification of this model.
Controls are incorporated for the endogeneity of road placement.
The model is applied to data for southern Belize, an area experiencing rapid