Determinants Of Deforestation In Ghana

Deforestation is one of the major environmental challenges facing Ghana. Today, the impacts of deforestation continue to impinge on livelihoods of rural and urban dwellers, disrupting important environmental functions and severely destroying forest ecosystems. Some studies have analyzed factors that influence deforestation in Ghana. However, none have placed emphasis on the occurrence of the Environmental Kuznets Curve for deforestation in Ghana. This study employs the Auto Regressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) Bounds Testing approach to cointegration to empirically investigate the factors that cause deforestation in the long and short run as well as investigating the occurrence of the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) for deforestation using time series data from 1970 and 2009.The long run estimation results indicate that variables such as urbanization, rural population pressure, globalization, Structural Adjustment Program (SAP), and agricultural technology affect deforestation in Ghana positively, while agricultural production index, forest exports value as a percentage of GDP, enforcement of property right and forest protection and exchange rate influence deforestation negatively. The impact of total external debt on deforestation Ghana was positive but not significant implying a weak confirmation of the Debt Resource Hypothesis in Ghana. Analysis of the EKC for deforestation in Ghana indicate that the phenomenon is real in Ghana with the per capita income turning point being at $ US 364.99 (in constant 2000 $ US) which will occur in 2011 at a deforestation rate of 1.5%. General and specific recommendations aimed at reducing deforestation are provided.