Economic development and agriculture: Managing protected areas and safeguarding the environment

The establishment of protected areas has been one of the most important interventions to protect biodiversity from the threat of human activities and in particular from the agricultural traditional activities where they have been restricted at the expense of the economy of the territory sparking in literature a heated debate between those who argue the these hinder the socio-economic development and on the other hand are those who argue that is able to advance social welfare. On the basis of these considerations, the weight of agricultural sector of a country is highly linked to the percentage of protected areas even though the trend of the weight of agriculture in the overall economy is also due to the “natural” evolution of the characteristics of agricultural systems. Indeed, literature findings indicate that the relative weight of the agricultural sector tends to decrease due to increases in other emergent sectors like industries and services. In Italy the protected areas seems to have had a negative effects on the agricultural sector, unlike Thailand. Adopting an simple linear regression model, using the software package R, considering a 22-year period (1990–2012), the results indicated that in Italy the increase in the percentage of forest areas has occurred at the expense of significant and negative effects on the agricultural sector in terms of added value. In comparison, in Thailand there have been significantly positive effects in terms of employment, largely in relation to the weight of agriculture in its national economy. To corroborate these conclusions, a simple regression model was applied to seven others countries where it proved equally valid but with different results for countries. Besides, it has been created a multiple regression model considering others emergent sectors of the economy. Even for this case the results are different for countries. Thus, management outcomes for the weight of agricultural sector may differ between countries, depending on both how protected areas are managed overall and from the economical features of the countries.