The Ecological Footprint of Poverty Alleviation: Evidence from Mexico's Oportunidades Program

Jennifer Alix-Garcia, Craig McIntosh, Katharine Sims and Jarrod R. Welch
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Jennifer Alix-Garcia: University of Wisconsin, Madison
Craig McIntosh: University of California, San Diego
Jarrod R. Welch: University of California, San Diego

The Review of Economics and Statistics, 2013, vol. 95, issue 2, 417-435

Abstract: We study the consequences of poverty-alleviation programs for environmental degradation. We exploit the community-level eligibility discontinuity for a conditional cash transfer program in Mexico to identify the impacts of income increases on deforestation and use the program's initial randomized rollout to explore household responses. We find that additional income raises consumption of land-intensive goods and increases deforestation. The observed production response and deforestation increase are larger in communities with poor road infrastructure. This suggests that better access to markets disperses environmental harm and that the full effects of poverty alleviation on the environment can be observed only where poor infrastructure localizes them. © 2013 The President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Keywords: environmental regulation; environment and development; poverty; land-use; deforestation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O12 O13 Q01 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (60)

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Working Paper: The Ecological Footprint of Poverty Alleviation: Evidence from Mexico's Oportunidades Program (2010)
Working Paper: The Ecological Footprint of Poverty Alleviation: Evidence from Mexico's Oportunidades Program (2010)
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