Deforestation, corruption, and private ownership in the forest sector

Abstract

One of the remedies launched in combating corruption in the forest sector is privatization of state forests (and private forest ownership). We hypothesized that privatization could reduce deforestation through reducing corruption. We found a statistically significant strong positive relation between corruption and deforestation for the period between 1995 and 2008 by using two different corruption indices and panel data, a highly statistically significant negative correlation between private forest ownership and corruption across countries by using univariate and multivariate models for three different corruption indices, and a highly statistically significant negative correlation between private forest ownership and deforestation across countries by using univariate and multivariate models.