Environmental Spending and Forest Loss

Since the early 2000s, environmental-state research has focused on the unique capacity and positionality of the state to address environmental degradation and sustainability. More recently, there has been a call in the literature to consider empirically how the environmental state has impacted the environment cross-nationally. We respond to this call by testing the hypothesis that more government spending for environmental protections corresponds with less forest loss in low- and middle-income nations. We use ordinary least squares regression on a sample of 70 nations. Our results support the idea that low- and middle-income nations can address environmental issues.