Individual pay for collective performance: Evidence from deforestation in Brazil
Wong P.Y. Kuralbayeva K. Anderson L.O. Pessøa A.C.M. Harding T.
June 2026Academic Press Inc.
Journal of Environmental Economics and Management
2026#138
Through the federal cash transfer program Bolsa Verde (BV), extremely poor households in remote protected areas (PAs) of the Brazilian Amazon receive cash conditional on maintaining the forest cover in their protected areas. Using high-resolution spatial data for 2005–2015 and difference-in-differences estimates, we find that the program reduces deforestation and the size of large deforestation plots. Measured as a share of the protected area, deforestation decreases by 0.08 percentage points when BV coverage increases from zero to its average level of 40% of PA households. This corresponds to one third of the post-program mean in comparable untreated areas. The effects are concentrated in unpopulated parts of PAs and outside private properties. Satellite-based alarm and enforcement data from Brazil further show that fines are issued at greater distances from alarm locations in BV areas. Together, these results are consistent with BV complementing formal enforcement through local monitoring and deterring large-scale deforestation unlikely to originate from recipients themselves. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that the resulting avoided CO2 emissions were achieved at relatively low abatement costs.
Brazil , Cash transfer , Deforestation , Monitoring
Text of the article Перейти на текст статьи
School of Business and Management, Queen Mary University of London, England, London, United Kingdom
Department of Economics & Business, Suleyman Demirel University (SDU), Almaty, Kazakhstan
Earth Observation and Geoinformatics Division, National Institute for Space Research (INPE), São Paulo, São José dos Campos, Brazil
Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazônia (IPAM), Distrito Federal, Brasília, Brazil
School of Economics, Innovation and Technology, Kristiania University of Applied Sciences, Oslo, Norway
School of Business and Management
Department of Economics & Business
Earth Observation and Geoinformatics Division
Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazônia (IPAM)
School of Economics
10 лет помогаем публиковать статьи Международный издатель
Книга Публикация научной статьи Волощук 2026 Book Publication of a scientific article 2026