The intense debate on the effectiveness of the war on drugs contrasts with the scarce quantitative evidence on its impacts on drug cultivation decisions by individual producers. Using panel data from an original survey of farmers living in coca-growing areas in Colombia, we evaluate the effectiveness of forced eradication policies implemented between 2000 and 2005. We find that one additional hectare eradicated decreases coca supply by 0.44 hectares, indicating that coca can only be eradicated at a very high cost.

Institutions play a significant role in stabilising large-scale cooperation
in common pool resource management. Without restrictions to govern human
behaviour, most natural resources are vulnerable to overexploitation. This study
used a sample size of 336 households and community-level data from 30 communities
around Gonarezhou National Park in Zimbabwe, to analyse the relationship
between institutions and biodiversity outcomes in community-based wildlife
conservation. Our results suggest a much stronger effect of institutions on biodiversity

In this paper, we identify economic implications of the pressure to share resources within a social network. Through a set of field experiments in rural Tanzania we randomly increased the expected harvest of the treatment group by the assignment of an improved and much more productive variety of maize.

Village democratization in rural China is found to have profound impacts on many socio-economic aspects, but little is understood as to how welfare impacts may occur through farmers' principal production activities. This study helps to fill this gap by investigating how village democracy affects rural household welfare through these channels, using a unique household survey. The authors first establish a theoretical framework that links democracy to household welfare through changes in production efficiency.

Costa Rica is considering expanding their marine protected areas (MPAs) to conserve marine resources. Due to the importance of households’ responses to an MPA in defining the MPA’s ecological and economic outcomes, this paper uses an economic decision framework to interpret data from near-MPA household surveys to inform this policy discussion. The model and data suggest that the impact of expanding MPAs relies on levels of enforcement and on-shore wages.

This paper uses a bio-economic model to analyze wildlife conservation in two habitats adjacent to a national park by two types of communities in Zimbabwe. One community is made up of peasant farmers operating under a benefit-sharing scheme such as CAMPFIRE, while the other is made up of commercial farmers practicing game farming in a conservancy. Both communities exploit wildlife by selling hunting licenses to foreign hunters but with different levels of success. The park agency plays a central role by authorizing the harvest quota for each community.