The ICMS-Ecológico is a fiscal transfer mechanism from states to municipalities, implemented in the early 1990's in Brazil, to reward municipalities for the creation and management of protected areas. This paper investigates the efficiency of this mechanism by testing for the presence of...

Various conservation initiatives have been implemented in developing countries with increasing involvement on the part of local governments. A concern in entrusting decisions to local governments is that the effectiveness of the conservation instrument can be threatened by interactions among...

This paper aims to test the effect of smallholder farmers' participatory social learning on their gain of performance in a village of southwest China. By exploring a panel structure survey data collected in the village, we identify the social learning effect using a Spatial Autoregressive (SAR)...

This case study compares the environmental efficiency of non-certified organic and conventional rice production in southern China. Using plot-season level survey data, we first test the existence of a "technology gap" between the two types of production, and then calculate the environmental...

This paper investigates whether inherited legacies such as legal origin allow of explaining deforestation in 110 developed and developing countries. The hypothesis is that differences in deforestation between countries can be attributed to their legal systems. Also, since nearly all common law...

This paper analyses the relationships between environmental compliance, corruption and environmental regulations in the case of forestry. Using a Principal-Agent model, we highlight interrelationships between firm's environmental non-compliance and corruption conditioned to the efficiency of the...

This paper investigates if past institutional, economic, political, social, and cultural features (i.e legal origins on law and regulations and colonial legacies) interact in shaping the current institutional performances on deforestation in 116 developed and developing countries. A two step...

This paper analyses the impact of farm productivity as well as farm size on deforestation in Brazil. A two step econometric approach is adopted. A bootstrapped translog stochastic frontier that is a posteriori checked for functional consistency is used in order to estimate technical efficiency...