Colombia's discharge fee system for water effluents is often held up as a model of a well-functioning, economic incentive pollution control program in a developing country. Yet few objective evaluations of the program have appeared.

Economic policies that boost profits from agroforesty, thereby creating financial incentives for land managers to favor these systems over less environmentally friendly land uses, could, in theory, have ancillary environmental benefits. This paper analyzes primary and secondary data to determine whether a voluntary price support program for Mexican coffee-mostly grown in shaded systems that supply important ecosystem services- has had such "win-win" benefits by stemming land-use change in the coffee sector.

This paper evaluates the impact of credit availability on communal and commercial sector maize output in Zimbabwe. This is important given the increased use of concessionary credit for agriculture as a policy strategy to increase agricultural output and food security, in response to the disruption caused by controversial land reform.

This paper uses relatively recent time series techniques on data spanning over different pricing regimes to estimate the aggregate agricultural supply response to price and non-price factors in Zimbabwe. The ARDL approach to cointegration employed here gives consistent estimates of supply response in the presence of regressor endogeneity and also permits the estimation of distinct estimates of both long-run and short-run elasticities when variables are not integrated of the same order.

The authors estimated the deforestation impact of Costa Rica’s pioneering environmental services payments program (Pagos por Servicios Ambientales, or PSA) between 2000 and 2005. Despite finding that less than 1 in 100 of enrolled land parcels would have been deforested annually without payments, the program’s potential for impact was increased by explicitly targeting areas with deforestation pressure and increasing some payments to enroll land that would have been cleared.

This article presents a case study of development of a Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) program related to drinking water in the city of Copán Ruinas, Honduras. (Text in Spanish)

The methodology used for the design and the implementation of this program is based on an integrated and adaptive management approach. It includes the following elements: general diagnostic, definition of objectives, analysis of enabling conditions, technical design, implementation and evaluation.