Only one tree from each seed? Environmental effectiveness and poverty alleviation in Mexico's Payments for Ecosystem Services Program

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

Volumn 7, Issue 4, 2015, Pages 1-40

  Alix Garcia, Jennifer M ^a   Sims, Katharine R E ^b   Yañez Pagans, Patricia ^c  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN MADISON   (United States)

^b AMHERST COLLEGE   (United States)

^c INTER AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT BANK   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84946718068     PISSN: 19457731     EISSN: 1945774X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1257/pol.20130139     Document Type: Article

References (91)

1. Alix-Garcia, Jennifer. 2007. "A spatial analysis of common property deforestation." Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 53 (2): 141-57.
2. Alix-Garcia, Jennifer. 2008. "An exploration of the positive effect of inequality on common property forests." Journal of Development Economics 87 (1): 92-105.
3. Alix-Garcia, Jennifer, Alain de Janvry, and Elizabeth Sadoulet. 2005. "A Tale of Two Communities: Explaining Deforestation in Mexico." World Development 33 (2): 219-35.
4. Alix-Garcia, Jennifer, Alain de Janvry, and Elisabeth Sadoulet. 2008. "The Role of Deforestation Risk and Calibrated Compensation in Designing Payments for Environmental Services." Environment and Development Economics 13 (3): 375-94.
5. Alix-Garcia, Jennifer, Craig McIntosh, Katharine R. E. Sims, and Jarrod R. Welch. 2013. "The Ecological Footprint of Poverty Alleviation: Evidence from Mexico's Oportunidades Program." Review of Economics and Statistics 95 (2): 417-35.
6. Alix-Garcia, Jennifer M., Elizabeth N. Shapiro, and Katharine R. E. Sims. 2012. "Forest Conservation and Slippage: Evidence from Mexico's National Payments for Ecosystem Services Program." Land Economics 88 (4): 613-38.
7. Alix-Garcia, Jennifer M., Katharine R. E. Sims, and Patricia Yañez-Pagans. 2015. "Only One Tree from Each Seed? Environmental Effectiveness and Poverty Alleviation in Mexico's Payments for Ecosystem Services Program: Dataset." American Economic Journal: Economic Policy. http://dx.doi.org/10.1257/pol.20130139.
8. Alix-Garcia, Jennifer, and Hendrik Wolff. 2014. "Payment for Ecosystem Services from Forests." Annual Review of Resource Economics 6: 361-80.
9. Angelsen, Arild. 2008. Moving Ahead with REDD: Issues, Options, and Implications. Bogor, Indonesia: Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR).
10. Angelsen, Arild. 2010. "Policies for reduced deforestation and their impact on agricultural production." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107 (46): 19639-44.
11. Arriagada, Rodrigo A. 2008. "Private provision of public goods: Applying matching methods to evaluate payments for ecosystem services in Costa Rica." http://cro.ots.ac.cr/rdmcnfs/datasets/biblioteca/pdfs/nbina-10580.pdf.
12. Arriagada, Rodrigo A., Paul J. Ferraro, Erin O. Sills, Subhrendu K. Pattanayak, and Silvia Cordero-Sancho. 2012. "Do Payments for Environmental Services Affect Forest Cover? A Farm-Level Evaluation from Costa Rica." Land Economics 88 (2): 382-99.
13. Arriagada, Rodrigo, and Charles Perrings. 2011. "Paying for International Environmental Public Goods." AMBIO: A Journal of the Human Environment 40 (7): 798-806.
14. Assies, Willem. 2008. "Land Tenure and Tenure Regimes in Mexico: An Overview." Journal of Agrarian Change 8 (1): 33-63.
15. Bray, David Barton, and Peter Klepeis. 2005. "Deforestation, Forest Transitions, and Institutions for Sustainability in Southeastern Mexico, 1900-2000." Environment and History 11 (2): 195-223.
16. Bruijnzeel, L. A. 2004. "Hydrological functions of tropical forests: Not seeing the soil for the trees?". Agriculture, Ecosystems, and Environment 104 (1): 185-228.
17. Bulte, Erwin H., Leslie Lipper, Randy Stringer, and David Zilberman. 2008. "Payments for ecosystem services and poverty reduction: Concepts, issues, and empirical perspectives." Environment and Development Economics 13 (3): 245-54.
18. Burbidge, John B., Lonnie Magee, and A. Leslie Robb. 1988. "Alternative Transformations to Handle Extreme Values of the Dependent Variable." Journal of the American Statistical Association 83 (401): 123-27.
19. Burgess, Robin, Matthew Hansen, Benjamin A. Olken, Peter Potapov, and Stefanie Sieber. 2012. "The Political Economy of Deforestation in the Tropics." Quarterly Journal of Economics 127 (4): 1707-54.
20. Chomitz, Kenneth M., and David A. Gray. 1996. "Roads, Land Use, and Deforestation: A Spatial Model Applied to Belize." World Bank Economic Review 10 (3): 487-12.
21. Comisión Nacional Forestal (CONAFOR). 2011. "Sistema Nacional de Información Forestal: Monitoreo Forestal de México: Aspectos Metodológicos." (accessed March 18).
22. Comisión Nacional Forestal (CONAFOR). 2012. "National Forestry Commission and the Payments for Ecosystem Services in Mexico." Paper presented at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, January.
23. Davis, Lucas W., Alan Fuchs, and Paul J. Gertler. 2014. "Cash for Coolers: Evaluating a Large-Scale Appliance Replacement Program in Mexico." American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 6 (4): 207-38.
24. De Jong, Bernardus H. J., Leonel Iglesias Gutiérrez, and José Armando Alanís de la Rosa. 2008. "Advances of Mexico in preparing for REDD." Paper presented at United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Workshop on the Methodological Issues relating to Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries. Tokyo, June 25-27.
25. Dehejia, Rajeev H., and Sadek Wahba. 1999. "Causal Effects in Nonexperimental Studies: Reevaluating the Evaluation of Training Programs." Journal of the American Statistical Association 94 (448): 1053-62.
26. Dehejia, Rajeev H., and Sadek Wahba. 2002. "Propensity Score-Matching Methods for Nonexperimental Causal Studies." Review of Economics and Statistics 84 (1): 151-61.
27. Deininger, Klaus W., and Bart Minten. 1999. "Poverty, Policies and Deforestation: The Case of Mexico." Economic Development and Cultural Change 47 (2): 313-44.
28. Deininger, Klaus, and Bart Minten. 2002. "Determinants of Deforestation and the Economics of Protection: An Application to Mexico." American Journal of Agricultural Economics 84 (4): 943-60.
29. Dell, Melissa, Benjamin F. Jones, and Benjamin A. Olken. 2012. "Temperature Shocks and Economic Growth: Evidence from the Last Half Century." American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics 4 (3): 66-95.
30. Díaz-Gallegos, José Reyes, Jean-François Mas, and Alejandro Velázquez. 2010. "Trends of tropical deforestation in Southeast Mexico." Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 31 (2): 180-96.
31. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. 2010. Global Forest Resources Assessment 2010: Main Report. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Rome.
32. Foster, Andrew D., and Mark R. Rosenzweig. 2003. "Economic Growth and the Rise of Forests." Quarterly Journal of Economics 118 (2): 601-37.
33. Gauvin, Crystal, Emi Uchida, Scott Rozelle, Jintao Xu, and Jinyan Zhan. 2010. "Cost-Effectiveness of Payments for Ecosystem Services with Dual Goals of Environment and Poverty Alleviation." Environmental Management 45 (3): 488-501.
34. Hansen, M. C., P. V. Potapov, R. Moore, M. Hancher, S. A. Turubanova, A. Tyukavina, D. Thau, et. al. 2013. "High-Resolution Global Maps of 21st-Century Forest Cover Change." Science 342 (6160): 850-53.
35. Hawkins, Slayde. 2011. Laying the Foundation: An Analytical Tool for Assessing Legal and Institutional Readiness for PES. The Katoomba Group. Washington, DC, December.
36. Ho, Daniel E., Kosuke Imai, Gary King, and Elizabeth A. Stuart. 2007. "Matching as Nonparametric Preprocessing for Reducing Model Dependence in Parametric Causal Inference." Political Analysis 15 (3): 199-236.
37. Honey-Rosés, Jordi, Kathy Baylis, and M. Isabel Ramírez. 2011. "A Spatially Explicit Estimate of Avoided Forest Loss." Conservation Biology 25 (5): 1032-43.
38. Imbens, Guido W., and Jeffrey M. Wooldridge. 2009. "Recent Developments in the Econometrics of Program Evaluation." Journal of Economic Literature 47 (1): 5-86.
39. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). 2007. Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report. Contribution of Working Groups I, II and II to the Fourth Assessment. United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). Geneva.
40. International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). 2009. Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) in Developing Countries. The United Nations Collaborative Programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries (UNFCCC). Bonn, Germany. https://cmsdata.iucn.org/downloads/iucn_redd_policy_briefing___march_09_1.pdf.
41. Jack, B. Kelsey, Carolyn Kousky, and Katharine R. E. Sims. 2008. "Designing payments for ecosystem services: Lessons from previous experience with incentive-based mechanisms." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105 (28): 9465-70.
42. Jayachandran, Seema. 2013. "Liquidity Constraints and Deforestation: The Limitations of Payments for Ecosystem Services." American Economic Review 103 (3): 309-13.
43. Jindal, Rohit, Brent Swallow, and John Kerr. 2008. "Forestry-based carbon sequestration projects in Africa: Potential benefits and challenges." Natural Resources Forum 32 (2): 116-30.
44. Landell-Mills, Natasha, and Ina T. Porras. 2002. Silver Bullet or Fools' Gold? A Global Review of Markets for Forest Environmental Services and Their Impact on the Poor. London: International Institute for Environment and Development.
45. Leimona, Beira, Laxman Joshi, and Meine van Noordwijk. 2009. "Can rewards for environmental services benefit the poor? Lessons from Asia." International Journal of the Commons 3 (1): 82-107.
46. Li, Shanjun, Joshua Linn, and Elisheba Spiller. 2013. "Evaluating 'Cash-for-Clunkers:' Program Effects on Auto Sales and the Environment." Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 65 (2): 175-93.
47. Lipper, Leslie, Takumi Sakuyama, Randy Stringer, and David Zilberman, eds. 2009. Payment for Environmental Services in Agricultural Landscapes. New York: Springer.
48. Mansfield, Carol, Subhrendu K. Pattanayak, William McDow, Robert McDonald, and Patrick Halpin. 2005. "Shades of Green: Measuring the value of urban forests in the housing market." Journal of Forest Economics 11 (3): 177-99.
49. Martin, Ralf, Laure B. De Preux, and Ulrich J. Wagner. 2011. "The Impacts of the Climate Change Levy on Manufacturing: Evidence from Microdata." National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Working Paper 17446.
50. Martínez, M. Luisa, Octavio Pérez-Maqueo, Gabriela Vázquez, Gonzalo Castillo-Campos, José García-Franco, Klaus Mehltreter, Miguel Equihua, and Rosario Landgrave. 2009. "Effects of land use change on biodiversity and ecosystem services in tropical montane cloud forests of Mexico." Forest Ecology and Management 258 (9): 1856-63.
51. Meneses-Tovar, Carmen Lourdes. 2009. "Analysis of the Normalized Differential Vegetation Index (NDVI) for the Detection of Degradation of Forest Coverage in Mexico 2008-2009." Food Resources Assessment Working Paper 173.
52. Miteva, Daniela A., Subhrendu K. Pattanayak, and Paul J. Ferraro. 2012. "Evaluation of biodiversity policy instruments: What works and what doesn't?". Oxford Review of Economic Policy 28 (1): 69-92.
53. Muñoz-Piña, Carlos, Alejandro Guevara, Juan Manuel Torres, and Josefina Braña. 2008. "Paying for the hydrological services of Mexico's forests: Analysis, negotiations and results." Ecological Economics 65 (4): 725-36.
54. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). 2012. Measuring Vegetation: Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI). http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/MeasuringVegetation/measuring_vegetation_2.php (accessed Feb 20, 2012).
55. Pagiola, Stefano. 2011. Using PES to implement REDD. World Bank: Latin America and Caribbean Sustainable Development Department. Washington, DC, January.
56. Pagiola, Stefano, Agustin Arcenas, and Gunars Platais. 2005. "Can Payments for Environmental Services Help Reduce Poverty? An Exploration of the Issues and the Evidence to Date from Latin America." World Development 33 (2): 237-53.
57. Pattanayak, Subhrendu K., Sven Wunder, and Paul J. Ferraro. 2010. "Show Me the Money: Do Payments Supply Environmental Services in Developing Countries?". Review of Environmental Economics and Policy 4 (2): 254-74.
58. Pfaff, Alexander. 1999. "What Drives Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon? Evidence from Satellite and Socioeconomic Data." Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 37 (1): 26-43.
59. Pfaff, Alexander, Suzi Kerr, Leslie Lipper, Romina Cavatassi, Benjamin Davis, Joanna Hendy, and G. Arturo Sánchez-Azofeifa. 2007. "Will buying tropical forest carbon benefit the poor? Evidence from Costa Rica." Land Use Policy 24 (3): 600-610.
60. Pfaff, Alexander, and Juan Robalino. 2012. "Protecting forests, biodiversity, and the climate: Predicting policy impact to improve policy choice." Oxford Review of Economic Policy 28 (1): 164-79.
61. Pfaff, Alexander, Juan Robalino, G. Arturo Sánchez-Azofeifa, Kwaw S. Andam, and Paul J. Ferraro. 2009. "Park Location Affects Forest Protection: Land Characteristics Cause Differences in Park Impacts across Costa Rica." B. E. Journal of Economic Analysis and Policy 9 (2): 1-26.
62. Pfaff, Alexander, Juan Robalino, C. Sandoval, C. Leon, G. Arturo Sánchez-Azofeifa. 2014. "Increasing the impacts of payments for ecosystem services: Location affects deforestation impact for Costa Rica's 2000-2005 PES." Unpublished.
63. Rios, Ana, and Stefano Pagiola. 2010. "Poor household participation in payments for environmental services in Nicaragua and Colombia." Munich Personal RePEc Archive (MPRA) Research Paper 13727.
64. Robalino, Juan A. 2007. "Land Conservation Policies and Income Distribution: Who Bears the Burden of our Environmental Efforts?". Environment and Development Economics 12 (4): 521-33.
65. Robalino, Juan A., and Alexander Pfaff. 2012. "Contagious development: Neighbor interactions in deforestation." Journal of Development Economics 97 (2): 427-36.
66. Robalino, Juan A., and Alexander Pfaff. 2013. "Ecopayments and Deforestation in Costa Rica: A Nationwide Analysis of PSA's Initial Years." Land Economics 89 (3): 432-88.
67. Roberts, Michael J., and Ruben N. Lubowski. 2007. "Enduring Impacts of Land Retirement Policies: Evidence from the Conservation Reserve Program." Land Economics 83 (4): 516-38.
68. Rosenbaum, Paul R., and Donald B. Rubin. 1985. "Constructing a Control Group Using Multivariate Matched Sampling Methods That Incorporate the Propensity Score." American Statistician 39 (1): 33-38.
69. Rubin, Donald B. 2001. "Using Propensity Scores to Help Design Observational Studies: Application to the Tobacco Litigation." Health Services and Outcomes Research Methodology 2 (3-4): 169-88.
70. Samuelson, Paul A. 1983. "Thünen at Two Hundred." Journal of Economic Literature 21 (4): 1468-88.
71. Sánchez-Azofeifa, G. Arturo, Alexander Pfaff, Juan Robalino, and Judson Boomhower. 2007. "Costa Rica's Payment for Environmental Services Program: Intention, Implementation, and Impact." Conservation Biology 21 (5): 1165-73.
72. Sanderson, Susan R. Walsh. 1984. Land Reform in Mexico 1910-1980. Waltham, MA: Academic Press.
73. Schlenker, Wolfram, W. Michael Hanemann, and Anthony C. Fisher. 2005. "Will U.S. Agriculture Really Benefit from Global Warming? Accounting for Irrigation in the Hedonic Approach." American Economic Review 95 (1): 395-406.
74. Shapiro, Elizabeth. 2010. "Political Economy and Community-Level Impacts of the Mexican Federal Payment for Ecosystem Services Programs." Unpublished.
75. Sims, Katharine R. E., Jennifer M. Alix-Garcia, Elizabeth Shapiro-Garza, Leah R. Fine, Volker C. Radeloff, Glen Aronson, Selene Castillo, et. al. 2014. "Improving Environmental and Social Targeting through Adaptive Management in Mexico's Payments for Hydrological Services Program." Conservation Biology 28 (5): 1151-59.
76. Stern, Nicholas. 2008. "The economics of climate change." American Economic Review 98 (2): 1-37.
77. Stuart, Elizabeth A. 2010. "Matching Methods for Causal Inference: A Review and a Look Forward." Statistical Science 25 (1): 1-21.
78. Tol, Richard S. J. 2009. "The Economic Effects of Climate Change." Journal of Economic Perspectives 23 (2): 29-51.
79. Turpie, J. K., C. Marais, and J. N. Blignaut. 2008. "The working for water programme: Evolution of a payments for ecosystem services mechanism that addresses both poverty and ecosystem service delivery in South Africa." Ecological Economics 65 (4): 788-98.
80. Uchida, Emi, Scott Rozelle, and Jintao Xu. 2009. "Conservation Payments, Liquidity Constraints, and Off-Farm Labor: Impact of the Grain-for-Green Program on Rural Households in China." American Journal of Agricultural Economics 91 (1): 70-86.
81. Uchida, Emi, Jintao Xu, Zhigang Xu, and Scott Rozelle. 2007. "Are the poor benefiting from China's land conservation program?". Environment and Development Economics 12 (4): 593-620.
82. United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. 2009. Copenhagen Accord. United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Copenhagen, December.
83. United Nations REDD Programme (UN-REDD). 2011. "About REDD+." http://www.un-redd.org/AboutREDD/tabid/582/Default.aspx (accessed January 13, 2012).
84. Von Thünen, Johann Heinrich, and Peter Hall. 1966. The Isolated State: An English Edition of Der isolierte Staat. New York: Pergamon Press.
85. Wunder, Sven. 2008. "Payments for environmental services and the poor: Concepts and preliminary evidence." Environment and Development Economics 13 (3): 279-97.
86. Wunder, Sven, Stefanie Engel, and Stefano Pagiola. 2008. "Taking stock: A comparative analysis of payments for environmental services programs in developed and developing countries." Ecological Economics 65 (4): 834-52.
87. Wunder, Sven, and Sheila Wertz-Kanounnikoff. 2009. "Payments for Ecosystem Services: A New Way of Conserving Biodiversity in Forests." Journal of Sustainable Forestry 28 (3-5): 576-96.
88. Wünscher, Tobias, Stefanie Engel, and Sven Wunder. 2008. "Spatial targeting of payments for environmental services: A tool for boosting conservation benefits." Ecological Economics 65 (4): 822-33.
89. Xu, Zhigang, Jintao Xu, Xiangsheng Deng, Jikun Huang, Emi Uchida, and Scott Rozelle. 2006. "Grain for Green versus Grain: Conflict between Food Security and Conservation Set-Aside in China." World Development 34 (1): 130-48.
90. Yañez-Pagans, Patricia. 2013. "Cash for cooperation? Payments for Ecosystem Services and common property management in Mexico." http://www.aae.wisc.edu/mwiedc/papers/2013/Yanez-pagans_Patricia.pdf.
91. Zilberman, David, Leslie Lipper, and Nancy McCarthy. 2008. "When could payments for environmental services benefit the poor?". Environment and Development Economics 13 (3): 255-78.