Do green institutions matter? An empirical analysis of environmental performance in latin american and caribbean countries

• Autor(a) principal: Barajas, Etheling Alicia Alexandre
• Data de Publicação: 2016
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10071/14048
• topic: Green Institutions; Latin America; Environmental impacts; Ecological economics; Green growth; Economia do ambiente; Impacto ambiental; Ecossistema

The late twentieth century presented a turning point for environmental protection. Having gained a better understanding of nature, scientists were (and still are) looking to comprehend the behavior of ecosystems, developing theories to explain the anthropogenic factors that produce negative impacts on the environment and searching for mitigating measures. The present research explores the effects of demographic, economic and regulatory factors on environmental performance for Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries since 1990, putting emphasis on what that I call “green institutions” and their measurement. The notion of “green institutions” encompasses environmental bodies, agreements, norms and regulations that each country has or shares with others. These policy factors are taken to exert pressure on a wide range of aspects pertaining to environmental performance such as pollutant emissions and forest loss. Panel data models are used for the analysis and deployed in two stages, first for all 33 LAC countries and afterwards for the major 20 countries in terms of population. The results in both stages reveal that green institutional factors do contribute to decrease deforestation, although surprisingly they also appear to increase some pollutant emissions. Such contradictory results highlight the need to develop more research in this area, using more advanced econometric techniques as well as including additional elements.