Rural Electrification and Deforestation in Côte d’Ivoire: a Pseudo-Panel approach (joint paper with Alpha Ly and Raja Chakir)
Anna Creti (Université Paris Dauphine)
Abstract
The objective of this paper is to analyse the impact of rural electrification on deforestation resulting from Ivorian households’ activities (fuelwood collection and forest clearance for agricultural purposes). First, we develop a theoretical framework, based on Angelsen(1999), to highlight the differentiated impacts of electrification on deforestation due to households’ activities. Second, using the last four waves of the household Living Stan-dards Measurement Surveys (1998, 2002, 2008 and 2015) and a pseudo-panel approach,we empirically show that the electricity access rate significantly reduces both average arable farm size and the percentage of households whose main source of fuel is firewood collected from the forest. Finally, we estimate an electrification threshold of 80% beyond which the effect of the electrification would be to increase arable farm size, so that increasing electrification would increase deforestation.