Institutions and the Effectiveness of Environmental Protection

This article uses satellite data to estimate the effectiveness of government protection on forested land across the globe over 2000-2018. Since deforestation is a significant contributor to precipitous declines in biodiversity, spillover of zoonotic viruses and climate change, measuring and analysing the effectiveness of protection is important for the future of conservation. It uses a regression discontinuity design at the boundaries of protected forest to overcome the fact that protection is not randomly assigned. It finds that many countries lack effective protection, and that effectiveness is strongly related to the quality of institutions and negatively related to economic development.