Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists · 2026 · Haoyu Wang、Gregory S. Amacher、Jintao Xu
中文摘要
森林砍伐一直是中国东北重点林区的重大问题:中央政府设定采伐配额,但地方国有森工企业却没有遵守这些限额的激励。我们构建了一个新颖的联邦制双委托人—单代理人模型,以评估国有森工企业驱动的森林砍伐的社会成本,其中假设国有企业管理者在省政府和中央政府的影响下做出隐藏决策。我们推导出导致森林砍伐的隐藏行为之社会成本的表达式,并使用面板数据计算社会损失、识别这些成本的主要因素。我们发现最重要的因素是大型天然林,以及中央林业管理部门获得的采伐信号微弱。我们的结果共同表明,除非进行政策改革,否则无法实现社会成本最小化的第一最优结果。
Abstract
Deforestation has been a major problem in China’s key northeastern forestry region, where the central government sets harvesting quotas, but local state forest enterprises have no incentives to comply with these limits. We develop a novel federalistic two-principal one-agent model to assess the social cost of state forest enterprise-driven deforestation, assuming that state managers make hidden decisions under the influence of provincial and central governments. We derive an expression of the social cost of hidden actions resulting in deforestation, and panel data are used to compute social losses and identify the main factors in these costs. We find the most important factors to be large natural forests and weak signals that the central forest administration has of harvesting. Our results collectively show that first best social cost minimizing outcomes are not possible unless policy reforms are undertaken.