Determinantes Políticos do Desmatamento da Amazônia

What are the political determinants of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon? This paper will argue that deforestation is an inefficient type of redistribution, in which the forest is a public good consistently distributed to interest groups rather than conserved. I hypothesize that there are two main causal processes to understand the persistence of this dynamic in Brazil: political competition and economic development. I test this theory by employing a panel data analysis. To do so, I extracted georeferenced data from 760 municipalities in the Legal Amazon between 2003 and 2018. Furthermore, I analyze the effect of four municipal elections on deforestation cycles. Preliminary results show a positive relationship between deforestation and economic development.