Impacts Of Eco-Forest Protection Policy On Farmers’ Management Decision-making Behavior And Income In Collective Forest Areas

Eco-forest certification in important or fragile ecological areas is the core component of healthy forest ecosystem,which plays a key role in building the safety barrier of human living environment.However,too large scope of eco-forest probably occupied the household original limited forest land resources.Strict forest logging restrictions in protection zones cannot completely avoid farmers’ adverse selection,so household forest management behavior directly determines the effect of eco-forest protection.Eco-forest protection policy changed the household congenital forest resource endowment mandatorily.Based on the goal of maximizing economic benefits,farmers adjusted the forest land management behavior,and then affected the family forestry income,which may produce social effects such as farmers’ career differentiation.This paper selected 500 farmer samples from 50 villages in 10 counties through Jiangxi monitoring project survey for collective forest right system reform,collected 3849 valid questionnaires in 9 consecutive years from 2011 to 2018.Based on the incentive compatibility theory,this paper attempted to analyze the farmers’ forest management decision-making mechanism under the incentive of the government’s eco-forest protection policy,revealing the importance of forest type difference in the farmers’ forest management decision-making process,and verifying the following impacts on farmers’ career differentiation and income change.In this paper,forestry public goods theory and "two mountains" ecological capital theory were used to re-identify the function of the eco-forest in southern collective forest regions.Based on incentive compatibility theory and farmers’ decision-making theory,farmers’ forest management behavior analysis framework was constructed under the background of eco-forest protection in collective forest areas.After reviewing the evolution of China’s eco-forest management policy and sorting out the relevant documents,this paper calculated the opportunity cost once each forest types was certified as eco-forest by forest resources clustering analysis,and compared household capital and labor input in forest management between different groups by Logistic-Tobit regression model.The Logistic regression model of the generalized estimation equation(GEE)was introduced to detect the internal mechanism of eco-forest protection policy on farmers’ career differentiation in collective forest regions.The generalized linear model(GLM)was used to explore the impact of forest resource endowment reconstruction on farmers’ forestry income under the background of eco-forest protection in collective forest areas.The main conclusions were as follows:(1)The goal of maximizing ecological benefits as government expect and the individual goal of maximizing the economic benefits of farmers can be achieved through optimizing the eco-forest compensation and logging restriction measures,and encouraging farmers to develop and utilize the eco-forest resources reasonably while protection;(2)The eco-forest protection policy changed the original forest resource endowment structure in collective forest area,and then household adjusted their forest management decision according to the expected revenue of different forest types;(3)Under the background of dual economy,the farmers’ career differentiation was a rational choice based on the household forest resources endowment.Different forest resources and collective eco-forest protection policy had different attraction to farmers engaged in agriculture and forestry production;(4)Farmers’ forestry income was the cooperation result of forest land resources,labor force and capital investment.The area ratio of each eco-forest type in collective forest areas impacted farmers’ forestry income to the different extent.