Samuelson and 21st Century Tropical Forest Economics

Much of Samuelson’s seminal paper on forestry (Samuelson, 1976) implicitly or explicitly addresses rich country settings where market and governance institutions function well and where forests are managed for timber through rotations. Yet, we argue, the central international forestry issue of the last two decades concerns the widespread and rapid deforestation and forest degradation observed throughout much of the tropics in low and middle income countries (that we will refer to as less-economically developed countries, LEDCs, from here on) in the Americas, Africa, and Asia (Laurance, 1999).