Assessing the Economy-Wide Effects of Costa Rica's Payments for Environmental Services Program

• Tác giả: Martin Ross
• Ngôn ngữ: eng
• Ký hiệu phân loại: 333.71 Economics of land and energy
• Thông tin xuất bản: World Bank, Washington, DC, 2014
• Bộ sưu tập: Tài liệu truy cập mở
• ID: 297564
• Chủ đề: 1. AGRICULTURAL COMMODITIES; 2. AGRICULTURAL LAND; 3. AGRICULTURAL LANDS; 4. AGRICULTURAL OUTPUT; 5. AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTION

Tóm tắt

Costa Rica's Program of Payments for Environmental Services (Pago de Servicios Ambientales, PSA) provides a unique opportunity to evaluate direct payments as a conservation policy tool. This paper reports evidence on how much more forest has been conserved in Costa Rica as a result of PSA contracts with landowners. Such evidence requires estimating a counterfactual outcome: how much forest would have been preserved if there had been no payments. By applying rigorous program evaluation methods that have been recommended for identifying the causal effects of conservation policies, we find that the PSA program does result in a small but statistically significant increase in the area of forest conserved.