The Political Economy of Wildlife Exploitation

In this paper we analyze the exploitation of wildlife in a Third World context. In the model there are two agents: an agency managing a habitat area of fixed size and a group of peasants. The agency managing the habitat area has the legal right to exploit the wildlife, while the local people hunt illegally. Introducing the concept of relative harvesting dominance, we demonstrate that the stock utilization depends crucially on the prevailing economic and ecological conditions. It is also shown that the existing property-rights regime appears in different forms depending on these conditions.