The Ecological Footprint of Poverty Alleviation: Evidence from Mexico's Oportunidades Program
研究了墨西哥有条件现金转移项目Oportunidades如何通过增加收入导致消费更多土地密集型商品，进而加剧森林砍伐，且道路基础设施差的地区影响更明显。
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.