Despite the establishment of conservation mechanisms and indigenous lands, Latin America has lost 10% of its forests in 20 years from 1990 to 2010. All of its great forest ecoregions are threatened: the Amazon, the Cerrado, the Gran Chaco, the Yungas, and the Meso-American Corridor. The purpose...

This paper investigates if and how the establishment of private commercial forest plantations in degraded forest reserves can conserve natural forests in Uganda. It uses difference-in-difference and decomposition analyses on household data collected from intervention and control villages in the...

The public trust doctrine is an ancient doctrine of public property law that governs sovereign stewardship of natural resources. The doctrine both promote public access to trust resources and requires sovereign protection of them for the benefit of the public, including future generations. The...

The possibility of encouraging the growth of forests as a means of sequestering carbon dioxide has received considerable attention because of concerns about the threat of global climate change due to the greenhouse effect. Would this approach be as inexpensive as studies have suggested? We...

This paper examines the role and impact of taxation on sustainable forest management. It is shown that fiscal instruments neither reinforce nor substitute for traditional regulatory approaches. Far from encouraging more sustainable forest management, fiscal instruments such as an inappropriate...

The international community considers the possibility of using aid as an instrument to improve natural resource conservation in developing countries. By making the amount of transfers dependent on the efforts of the recipient countries to improve conservation, appropriate incentives can be...

This paper develops a theoretical as well as an empirical model of deforestation and economic development in a tropical forest economy. The empirical model is estimated using panel data for 316 municipalities in the Brazilian Amazon during the period 1970-1985. The effects of controversial...