2010年哥斯达黎加科技发展创新战略

哥斯达黎加新政府重视国家科技创新,将地球科学和空间科学、新材料、生物多样性、自然资源利用、可替代能源、卫生和数字化技术等七个领域作为国家科技优先发展战略。把发展航天工业作为国家科技创新的突破口。信息与通信技术发展跃居拉美第三位,在环保方面也取得了骄人业绩,位居拉关第三。同时,高科技产业健康发展,提高了出口产品技术含量。     

Payments for environmental services as an alternative to logging under weak property rights: The case of Indonesia

Decentralization reforms in Indonesia have led to local communities negotiating logging agreements with timber companies for relatively low financial payoffs and at high environmental cost. This paper analyzes the potential of payments for environmental services (PES) to provide an alternative to logging for these communities and to induce forest conservation. We apply a game-theoretical model of community-firm interactions that explicitly considers two stylized conditions present in the Indonesian context: (i) community rights to the forest remain weak even after decentralization, and (ii) the presence of logging companies interested in the commercial exploitation of the forest. Intuition may suggest that PES design should focus on those communities with the lowest expected payments from logging deals. However, we show that these communities may not be able to enforce a PES agreement, i.e., they may not be able to prevent logging activities by timber companies. Moreover, some communities would conserve the forest anyway; in these cases PES would not lead to additional environmental gains. Most important, the introduction of PES may increase a community's expected payoff from a logging agreement. A failure to consider this endogeneity in expected payoffs could lead to communities opting for logging agreements despite PES, simply allowing communities to negotiate better logging deals. Our results indicate that PES design is a complex task, and that the costs of an effective PES system could potentially be much higher than expected from observing current logging fees. Using data collected in Indonesia on actual logging fees received by communities, we illustrate how the theoretical results could be used in empirical analysis to guide PES design. Our results are likely to be useful in other cases where local people make resource use decisions but have weak property rights over these resources, and where external commercial forces are present. The results highlight the importance of understanding the details of the local context in order to design PES programs appropriately.     

Paying for the environmental services of silvopastoral practices in Nicaragua

Agricultural landscapes can provide many valuable ecosystem services, but many are externalities from the perspective of farmers and so tend to be under-produced. This paper examines an effort to make direct payments for ecosystem services (PES) in an agricultural landscape. The Regional Integrated Silvopastoral Ecosystem Management Project is piloting the use of PES to induce adoption of silvopastoral practices in the Matiguás-Río Blanco area in Nicaragua. Silvopastoral practices could substantially improve service provision while retaining agricultural production, but they have found only limited acceptance among farmers. The Silvopastoral Project seeks to increase their adoption by paying farmers for the expected increase in biodiversity conservation and carbon sequestration services that these practices would provide. The Project developed an ‘environmental services index’ (ESI) and pays participants for net increases in ESI points. Although the Silvopastoral Project is still underway, it already appears to have succeeded in inducing farmers to increase substantially the use of practices that generate higher levels of ecosystem services. In the project's first two years, over 24% of the total area experienced some form of land use change. The area of degraded pasture fell by two thirds, while pastures with high tree density increased substantially, as did fodder banks and live fences. On-going monitoring indicates that these land use changes are in fact generating the desired services. Questions remain about the long-term sustainability of the approach, however. To ensure sustainability, long-term payments are likely to be needed, raising the question of how they will be financed. Payments by water users and by carbon buyers provide a partial answer to this challenge, but still leave many gaps.     

Designing payments for environmental services in theory and practice: An overview of the issues

Payments for environmental services (PES) have attracted increasing interest as a mechanism to translate external, non-market values of the environment into real financial incentives for local actors to provide environmental services (ES). In this introductory paper, we set the stage for the rest of this Special Issue of Ecological Economics by reviewing the main issues arising in PES design and implementation and discussing these in the light of environmental economics. We start with a discussion of PES definition and scope. We proceed to review some of the principal dimensions and design characteristics of PES programs and then analyze how PES compares to alternative policy instruments. Finally, we examine in detail two important aspects of PES programs: their effectiveness and their distributional implications.PES is not a silver bullet that can be used to address any environmental problem, but a tool tailored to address a specific set of problems: those in which ecosystems are mismanaged because many of their benefits are externalities from the perspective of ecosystem managers. PES is based on the beneficiary-pays rather than the polluter-pays principle, and as such is attractive in settings where ES providers are poor, marginalized landholders or powerful groups of actors. An important distinction within PES is between user-financed PES in which the buyers are the users of the ES, and government-financed PES in which the buyers are others (typically the government) acting on behalf of ES users. In practice, PES programs differ in the type and scale of ES demand, the payment source, the type of activity paid for, the performance measure used, as well as the payment mode and amount. The effectiveness and efficiency of PES depends crucially on program design.     

哥斯达黎加科技政策与科技发展

1986年哥斯达黎加成立了科学技术部（MICIT）,以统一协调及管理全国科技活动。2008年研发投入达到1．18亿美元,占国内生产总值的0．4％,全国从事科技活动人员达到18383人。国家信息基础设施不断完善,国家数字签名系统研发成功并投入使用,全国智能社区网络建设成效显著。     

Taking stock: A comparative analysis of payments for environmental services programs in developed and developing countries

Payments for environmental services (PES) are an innovative approach to conservation that has been applied increasingly often in both developed and developing countries. To date, however, few efforts have been made to systematically compare PES experiences. Drawing on the wealth of case studies in this Special Issue, we synthesize the information presented, according to case characteristics with respect to design, costs, environmental effectiveness, and other outcomes. PES programs often differ substantially one from the other. Some of the differences reflect adaptation of the basic concept to very different ecological, socioeconomic, or institutional conditions; others reflect poor design, due either to mistakes or to the need to accommodate political pressures. We find significant differences between user-financed PES programs, in which funding comes from the users of the ES being provided, and government-financed programs, in which funding comes from a third party. The user-financed programs in our sample were better targeted, more closely tailored to local conditions and needs, had better monitoring and a greater willingness to enforce conditionality, and had far fewer confounding side objectives than government-financed programs. We finish by outlining some perspectives on how both user- and government-financed PES programs could be made more effective and cost-efficient.     

Broadening the picture: Negotiating payment schemes for water-related environmental services in the Netherlands

This paper explores how the development of payment schemes for water-related environmental services can be understood and supported. Currently, the development of such payment schemes is perceived mainly through theoretical lenses offered by economists and hydrologists. Notwithstanding the usefulness and appropriateness of these theoretical lenses, they have difficulties to accommodate certain aspects of the development of payment schemes for water-related environmental services. Specifically, the discussion of negotiation aspects remains relatively isolated and superficial, even though it is generally acknowledged that the development of payment schemes is often significantly influenced by political negotiations. This paper addresses this limitation. It shows how the main elements of negotiation analysis can provide a theoretical underpinning for important drivers behind the development of specific payment schemes, which are beyond the scope of hydrological or economic rationality. Four cases of water-related payment schemes in the Netherlands are studied, employing one of the key insights offered by negotiation analysis: the importance of the underlying interests and values of the parties involved. The findings of these four cases show the potential of negotiation analysis as a useful complement for understanding and supporting the development of payment schemes for environmental services.     

Selling two environmental services: In-kind payments for bird habitat and watershed protection in Los Negros, Bolivia

Marketing several environmental services from a single area can help access diverse sources of funding and make conservation a more competitive land use. In Bolivia's Los Negros valley (Department of Santa Cruz), bordering the Amboró National Park, 46 farmers are currently paid to protect 2774 ha of a watershed containing the threatened cloud-forest habitat of 11 species of migratory birds. In this payment for environmental services (PES) scheme, annual contracts prohibit tree cutting, hunting and forest clearing on enrolled lands. Farmer-landowners as service providers submit to independent yearly monitoring, and are sanctioned for non-compliance. Facilitated by a local NGO, Fundación Natura Bolivia, one service buyer is an international conservation donor (the US Fish and Wildlife Service) interested in biodiversity conservation. The second service users are downstream irrigators who likely benefit from stabilized dry-season water flows if upstream cloud forests are successfully protected. Individual irrigators have been reluctant to pay, but the Los Negros municipal government has on their behalf contributed ~ US$4500 to the scheme. The negotiated payment mode is annual quid pro quo in-kind compensations in return for forest protection. Predominantly, payments are made as “contingent project implementation”, transferring beehives supplemented by apicultural training. With regard to service provision, environment committees and education programs have increased awareness in downstream communities of the probable water-supply reduction effect of continued upstream deforestation. External donors have funded subsequent studies providing basic economic, hydrological and biodiversity data, and covered PES start-up (~ US$40,000) and running transaction costs (~ US$3000 per year over the last three years). The greatest challenges in the development of the PES mechanism have been the slow process of building trust between service buyers and providers, and in achieving clear service-provision additionality.     

Participatory decision-making in land use planning: An application in Costa Rica

The economic, social and environmental implications of electricity generation for land use planning are a significant and complex problem in many countries. One reason for this complexity is the existence of several stakeholders with very different views or perceptions of the different criteria underlying the decision-making process. Therefore, the aggregation of individual stakeholder preferences into a single collective preference is a crucial problem. In this paper, this type of problem is addressed with the help of a methodology based upon the definition of a consensus within a distance-based framework. The methodology is applied to a case study in Costa Rica at two levels: at a national level and at a river basin level. The River Birrís was chosen because the conflict of interests between agricultural production and electricity generation are especially significant in this basin.     

Spatial targeting of payments for environmental services: A tool for boosting conservation benefits

Payments for environmental services (PES) have become an increasingly popular market-based instrument to translate external, non-market environmental services into financial incentives for landowners to preserve the ecosystems that provide the services. However, lack of spatial differentiation in the targeting mechanism may lead to efficiency losses. Addressing this challenge, we construct an applied site selection tool, which takes into account three variables that vary in space: environmental services provided, risks of losing those services, and participation costs. Using data from Costa Rica's Nicoya Peninsula, we empirically test the tool's potential to increase the financial efficiency of the forest-focused PES program in place. Results show that, given a fixed budget, efficiency increases radically if per hectare payments are aligned to landowners' heterogeneity in participation costs, involving opportunity, transaction and direct costs of protection, respectively. Selecting sites based on environmental service potential also moderately increases efficiency. Overall additionality could in the best case be doubled, but remains generally limited due to current low deforestation risks prevailing in Costa Rica. To take advantage of the high efficiency potentials of flexible payments, we propose inverse auction systems as a cost-effective approach for the determination of micro-level participation costs.     

Towards a unified scheme for environmental and social protection: Learning from PES and CCT experiences in developing countries

Environmental protection and poverty alleviation in the developing world are usually heralded as joint objectives. However, these two goals are often associated with different sectoral policy instruments. While so−called payments for environmental services (PES) are increasingly being promoted for environmental protection, poverty alleviation is increasingly addressed by conditional cash transfers (CCT) program. These instruments although aimed to achieve distinct objectives have a number of similarities and challenges in their design and implementation phases. This paper elaborates on these similarities and develops a unifying generic framework that is used to discuss the extent to which both approaches could be unified.     

Payments for agrobiodiversity conservation services for sustained on-farm utilization of plant and animal genetic resources

This paper discusses the potential application of Payment for Ecosystem Services-like schemes to tackle market failures associated with the public good characteristics of agrobiodiversity conservation services. So called payments for agrobiodiversity conservation services (PACS) would increase the private benefits from utilizing local plant and animal genetic resources on-farm through voluntary reward mechanisms, so as to sustain their on-farm conservation. Theoretical and applied insights about PACS are discussed and attention drawn to some of the challenges to be overcome in implementing PACS. In particular, these relate to the identification of potential buyers, the complex institutional setting in which PACS might operate and the articulation of a meaningful conservation goal based on a safe minimum standard approach. The latter is urgently needed, so as to ensure that additional agrobiodiversity services are generated. Relative to a fixed pricing approach, PACS schemes that seek to overcome information asymmetries through the use of conservation auctions may be associated with significant efficiency gains. However, potential trade-offs between ecological effectiveness, economic efficiency, and social equity considerations need to be carefully evaluated.     

Efficiency of Payments for Environmental Services: Equity and additionality in a case study from a Biosphere Reserve in Chiapas, Mexico

Payments for Environmental Services (PES) have been claimed as a more efficient way of accomplishing conservation and development goals than other indirect strategies, reaching their optimum when the buyer pays the opportunity costs of the foregone benefits. Different inefficient situations have been described, like lack of additionality, where payments are given for practices that would have been adopted anyway. Trade-offs between efficiency and equity of PES have usually emerged as well. In this paper we assess the equity, additionality and stakeholders' perceptions of a PES scheme in a Mexican community inside a Biosphere Reserve. We applied structured interviews to all adults, a total of 66 people from 31 households. Our results show a dual response in equity and additionality, depending on land tenure. PES have an egalitarian effect within landowners and landless groups, but it broadens the gap between them. Additionality is low for landowners and high for the landless people in the community, even though the former are the ones with full decision over the land. Although the scheme does not seem efficient under the classical PES paradigm, it is perceived as a reward, reinforcing conservation attitudes even though most of the interviewees claim it to be insufficient.     

Asymmetric information and contract design for payments for environmental services

In contractual relationships involving payments for environmental services, conservation buyers know less than landowners know about the costs of contractual compliance. Landowners in such circumstances use their private information as a source of market power to extract informational rents from conservation agents. Reducing informational rents is an important task for buyers of environmental services who wish to maximize the services obtained from their limited budgets. Reducing informational rents also mitigates concerns about the “additionality” of PES contracts because low-cost landowners are least likely to provide different levels of services in the absence of a contract. Paying low-cost landowners less thus makes resources available for contracts with higher opportunity cost landowners, who are more likely to provide substantially different levels of services in the absence of a contract. To reduce informational rents to landowners, conservation agents can take three approaches: (1) acquire information on observable landowner attributes that are correlated with compliance costs; (2) offer landowners a menu of screening contracts; and (3) allocate contracts through procurement auctions. Each approach differs in terms of its institutional, informational and technical complexity, as well as in its ability to reduce informational rents without distorting the level of environmental services provided. No single approach dominates in all environments. Current theory and empirical work provides practitioners with insights into the relative merits of each approach. However, more theoretical work and experimentation in the laboratory and the field are necessary before definitive conclusions about the superiority of one or more of these approaches can be drawn.     

Paying for the hydrological services of Mexico's forests: Analysis, negotiations and results

Mexico faces both high deforestation and severe water scarcity. The Payment for Hydrological Environmental Services (PSAH) Program was designed to complement other policy responses to the crisis at the interface of these problems. Through the PSAH, the Mexican federal government pays participating forest owners for the benefits of watershed protection and aquifer recharge in areas where commercial forestry is not currently competitive. Funding comes from fees charged to water users, from which nearly US$18 million are earmarked for payments of environmental services. Applicants are selected according to several criteria that include indicators of the value of water scarcity in the region. This paper describes the process of policy design of the PSAH, the main actors involved in the program, its operating rules, and provides a preliminary evaluation. One of the main findings is that many of the program's payments have been in areas with low deforestation risk. Selection criteria need to be modified to better target the areas where benefits to water users are highest and behavior modification has the least cost, otherwise the program main gains will be distributive, but without bringing a Pareto improvement in overall welfare.     

Upstream-downstream transactions and watershed externalities: Experimental evidence from Kenya

Where environmental policies or projects seek behavioral change, understanding underlying norms and preferences is essential to securing environmental outcomes. This study models a payment for environmental services intervention in an experimental field laboratory in Nyanza Province, Kenya. Upstream and downstream individuals are paired in a standard investment game, in which the upstream mover's investment represents land use decisions and the downstream mover responds with a choice of compensation payment. The experimental intervention introduces an enforcement treatment on the downstream movers' compensation decisions for a single round. Underlying social preferences and identity appear to shape individual transactions between upstream and downstream individuals. Upstream first movers are sensitive to the removal of the enforcement on their downstream partners in the second round, and make decisions consistent with crowding out of social preferences. The results suggest that environmental interventions may affect resource decisions for individuals who are not themselves direct targets of enforcement.     

生态环境服务付费的国际经验及其对中国的启示

生态环境服务付费在国际上引起关注的三个背景是:(1)生态问题的凸显;(2)新古典经济学意识形态的流行;(3)保护环境和减少贫困一石两鸟的期望。与生态环境服务付费理念相似的概念,在我国一般被称为生态补偿。生态补偿在我国受到重视是国情使然。这一国情与上述三个背景有共通之处,也有独特之处。这决定了生态环境服务付费的国际经验对我国生态补偿有潜在的借鉴意义,同时生态补偿又有中国特色。生态环境服务付费的国际经验对我国的主要启示是:(1)需要提高下游(环境服务需求方)的生态补偿意识;(2)公平的生态补偿机制要求考虑上游保护生态环境的机会成本;(3)权属明晰化是使生态补偿机制长久可持续的前提;(4)政府应鼓励地方创新形式多样的补偿形式;等等。     

Labor force growth and the environment in Costa Rica

The introduction to this report of a study that examines the potential environmental impacts of labor force growth (LFG) in Costa Rica under LFG scenarios notes that LFG is an economically critical aspect of population growth that can affect the environment by expanding the economy's production possibilities frontier and/or by increasing consumption. The introduction also explains why Costa Rica is ideal for this study and identifies the study as unique because it constructs a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model using 10 environmental indicators and because it models uncertainty regarding the values of the economic parameters. The report continues by reviewing the literature linking population and environmental issues; detailing the CGE model; discussing the 10 environmental indicators (deforestation, erosion, pesticide use, overfishing, hazardous wastes, inorganic wastes, organic wastes, greenhouse gas emissions, air pollution, and water/sewer usage) used in the model; and explaining the method used to simulate the impacts of LFG. The major conclusions that emerged from the results of this study are that 1) the economy-wide impacts of LFG (and, thus, population growth) on the environment are important and vary significantly according to the amounts of physical and human capital present in the labor force and 2) the impacts of LFG vary substantially among environmental indicators.     

Trade Liberalization and the Relative Wages for More-Skilled Workers in Costa Rica

A prominent argument regarding the effects of trade liberalization on the dispersion of wages in LDCs is that trade liberalization should lower the relative demand for more-skilled workers by inducing between-sector shifts towards sectors intensive in unskilled labor. Based on a disaggregating, nonparametric approach that imposes little structure on the data, the paper presents evidence that trade liberalization in Costa Rica led to an increase in relative demand. Other findings are consistent with the "skill-enhancing-trade hypothesis," whereby trade liberalization induces an acceleration of physical capital imports, which raises relative demand through capital–skill complimentarily.