Choice of environmental policy instrument in developing countries
An application to fire regulation in the Brazilian Amazon
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21691077 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Erich Friol Gimenes (0000-0001-5810-2198, Universidade Federal do ABC), Thiago Morello (0000-0001-6794-1815, Universidade Federal do ABC, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Volume | 31 |
| Issue | 2-3 |
| Pages | 279-299 |
| Publication date | 2026-04-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Environment and Development Economics (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1355-770X • E-ISSN: 1469-4395 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s1355770x25100363 |
| OpenAlex | W7134948603 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 57 |
Market-based instruments are increasingly incorporated into developing countries’ environmental regulation, which has historically been dominated by command-and-control (CAC). To discover whether this shift can enhance efficiency, the two policy instruments are compared in the context of agricultural fire regulation. We unveil optimal policy principles, such as incentivizing compliance proportionally to non-compliance’s net benefit. A simulation based on data from Brazilian Amazon municipalities accounts for ambiguous land tenure, indirect deforestation and non-additionality. The results reveal that CAC, when perfectly sanctioned, is more efficient than market-based policy. Such primacy is exacerbated in the realistic case where sanctions are likely to be cancelled on appeal to the judicial power and legally limited in size, because of the opportunities to better address adverse selection and to generate revenue with fines. Therefore, we show that market-based policy is not necessarily superior to CAC and that imperfect sanctioning does not inevitably lead to inefficiency
Amazon rainforest · Appeal · Environmental policy · Imperfect · Sanctions · Unintended consequences · Agricultural risk and resilience · Economic Policies and Impacts · Regulation and Compliance Studies
The Theory of Environmental Policy
The Theory of Incentives
Efficacy of Command-and-Control and Market-Based Environmental Regulation in Developing Countries
Anthropogenic disturbance in tropical forests can double biodiversity loss from deforestation
Carbon loss from forest degradation exceeds that from deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon
Fires in the Amazon Region
Smallholders’ Perceptions of Fire in the Brazilian Amazon
Eroding resilience of deforestation interventions—evidence from Brazil’s lost decade
Crop Residue Burning in India
Direct conservation payments in the Brazilian Amazon
Fertilizer Adoption by Smallholders in the Brazilian Amazon
Understanding factors associated with agricultural mechanization
Prosecuting Environmental Crime
Hazy Days
Incentivizing compliance
Fire economy and actor network of forest and land fires in Indonesia
Costs and effectiveness of public and private fire management programs in the Brazilian Amazon and Cerrado
Fire risk perpetuates poverty and fire use among Amazonian smallholders
Perceptions across scales of governance and the Indonesian peatland fires
Separation of powers and the Ecuadorian Supreme Court
Between a rock and a hard place
A misfit in policy to protect Russia’s black soil region. An institutional analytical lens applied to the ban on burning of crop residues
Forbidden fire
The Multilevel Politics of Enforcement
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |