Historical and Comparative Institutional Analysis: Evidences from Deforestation

This paper investigates if past institutional, economic, political, social, and cultural features (i.e legal origins on law and regulations and colonial legacies) interact in shaping the current institutional performances on deforestation in 116 developed and developing countries. A two step approach is implemented. First, we investigate relations between colonial legacies-legal origins and current institutional performances. We find that common law countries and previous British colonies have better institutions that French civil law and other past colonized countries. Second, we provide two econometrics procedures to capture some institutional persistences on deforestation which allow to estimate current institutional effects on deforestation conditioned to historical variables. In a first time, we run our deforestation model on different samples (under historical variables) and in a second time, interactive variables are introduced. We find that (i) French civil law countries deforest less than common law ones; (ii) less corruption and more secured property rights decrease deforestation in common law countries; (iii) better rules of law reduce deforestation but this feature is more likely in previous British colonies or non colonized countries. Finally, this paper shows that current institutional performances are important factors in the process of deforestation and that these factors are conditioned to past influences.