L’effet de la démocratie sur la dégradation de l’environnement : le cas de la déforestation dans le bassin du Congo

Abstract

This article studies the empirical relationship between democracy and deforestation from a sample of nine countries in the Congo Basin for the period from 1990 to 2010. The empirical analysis highlights two important findings. First, GDP per capita has a negative impact on the preservation of forest cover. Second, improving the level of democracy reduces the rate of deforestation for the countries considered. This last result implies that, rather than focusing solely on economic development and demographic factors to explain the dynamics of deforestation, research must also take into account the level of democracy.

Keywords

• democracy
• deforestation
• quality of institutions
• Congo Basin
• GMM model