IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/plo/pone00/0233775.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Freshwater fisheries conservation can increase biodiversity

Author

Listed:
  • Declan Butorac
  • Paulo Santos
  • Phousavanh Phouvin
  • Francois Guegan

Abstract

We evaluate the impact of a fisheries management program centered on the definition of Fish Conservation Zones on biodiversity, measured as the number of species caught in the last 12 months. Data comes from a set of 32 villages in central Lao PDR, of which half participated in the program, and the remaining are a set of matched control villages. The estimated causal effects are large (an increase between 29 and 32 species) and robust to the potential importance of unmeasured confounders. We also show that initial conditions may matter, as the program seems particularly effective in villages with high probability of participating in the program. These results are particularly important given the paucity of evidence regarding the impact of conservation programs on biodiversity, particularly in the context of freshwater ecosystems. Further directions of research suggested by these results are discussed.

Suggested Citation

  • Declan Butorac & Paulo Santos & Phousavanh Phouvin & Francois Guegan, 2020. "Freshwater fisheries conservation can increase biodiversity," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 15(5), pages 1-14, May.
  • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0233775
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0233775
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0233775
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0233775&type=printable
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1371/journal.pone.0233775?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Joshua D. Angrist & Jörn-Steffen Pischke, 2009. "Mostly Harmless Econometrics: An Empiricist's Companion," Economics Books, Princeton University Press, edition 1, number 8769.
    2. Elizabeth J.Z. Robinson, 2016. "Resource-Dependent Livelihoods and the Natural Resource Base," Annual Review of Resource Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 8(1), pages 281-301, October.
    3. Imbens,Guido W. & Rubin,Donald B., 2015. "Causal Inference for Statistics, Social, and Biomedical Sciences," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521885881, September.
    4. Sascha O. Becker & Andrea Ichino, 2002. "Estimation of average treatment effects based on propensity scores," Stata Journal, StataCorp LP, vol. 2(4), pages 358-377, November.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Guido W. Imbens, 2015. "Matching Methods in Practice: Three Examples," Journal of Human Resources, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 50(2), pages 373-419.
    2. Hartarto, Romi Bhakti & LeMay-Boucher, Philippe, 2024. "Impacts of Conditionality on Consumption: Evidence from the Family Hope Program in Indonesia," Accountancy, Economics, and Finance Working Papers 2024-03, Heriot-Watt University, Department of Accountancy, Economics, and Finance.
    3. Marie Bjørneby & Annette Alstadsæter & Kjetil Telle, 2018. "Collusive tax evasion by employers and employees. Evidence from a randomized fi eld experiment in Norway," Discussion Papers 891, Statistics Norway, Research Department.
    4. Martin Schlotter & Guido Schwerdt & Ludger Woessmann, 2011. "Econometric methods for causal evaluation of education policies and practices: a non-technical guide," Education Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 19(2), pages 109-137.
    5. Marusca De Castris & Guido Pellegrini, 2015. "Neighborhood Effects On The Propensity Score Matching," Working Papers 0515, CREI Università degli Studi Roma Tre, revised 2015.
    6. Dennis Shen & Peng Ding & Jasjeet Sekhon & Bin Yu, 2022. "Same Root Different Leaves: Time Series and Cross-Sectional Methods in Panel Data," Papers 2207.14481, arXiv.org, revised Oct 2022.
    7. Art B. Owen & Hal Varian, 2018. "Optimizing the tie-breaker regression discontinuity design," Papers 1808.07563, arXiv.org, revised Jul 2020.
    8. Cristian Mardones & Pablo Herreros, 2023. "Ex post evaluation of voluntary environmental policies on the energy intensity in Chilean firms," Environment, Development and Sustainability: A Multidisciplinary Approach to the Theory and Practice of Sustainable Development, Springer, vol. 25(9), pages 9111-9136, September.
    9. Tymon Słoczyński, 2022. "Interpreting OLS Estimands When Treatment Effects Are Heterogeneous: Smaller Groups Get Larger Weights," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 104(3), pages 501-509, May.
    10. John A. List, 2024. "Field Experiments: Here Today Gone Tomorrow?," The American Economist, Sage Publications, vol. 69(2), pages 214-234, October.
    11. Colnet Bénédicte & Josse Julie & Varoquaux Gaël & Scornet Erwan, 2022. "Causal effect on a target population: A sensitivity analysis to handle missing covariates," Journal of Causal Inference, De Gruyter, vol. 10(1), pages 372-414, January.
    12. Sloczynski, Tymon, 2018. "A General Weighted Average Representation of the Ordinary and Two-Stage Least Squares Estimands," IZA Discussion Papers 11866, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    13. Hao, Shiming, 2021. "True structure change, spurious treatment effect? A novel approach to disentangle treatment effects from structure changes," MPRA Paper 108679, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    14. Candon, David, 2018. "The effect of cancer on the labor supply of employed men over the age of 65," Economics & Human Biology, Elsevier, vol. 31(C), pages 184-199.
    15. Byard, Donal & Darrough, Masako & Suh, Jangwon, 2019. "There is No Evidence that Mandatory IFRS Adoption Significantly Decreased IPO Underpricing," SocArXiv b56u2, Center for Open Science.
    16. Karel Janda & Oleg Kravtsov, 2022. "Regulatory Stress Tests and Bank Responses: Heterogeneous Treatment Effect in Dynamic Settings," International Journal of Central Banking, International Journal of Central Banking, vol. 18(2), pages 1-49, June.
    17. Mark Kattenberg & Bas Scheer & Jurre Thiel, 2023. "Causal forests with fixed effects for treatment effect heterogeneity in difference-in-differences," CPB Discussion Paper 452, CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis.
    18. Guillermo Cabanillas-Jiménez, 2021. "Testing the Permanent Income Hypothesis using the Spanish Christmas Lottery," Studies in Economics 2104, School of Economics, University of Kent.
    19. Stefano Carattini & Suphi Sen, 2019. "Carbon Taxes and Stranded Assets: Evidence from Washington State," CESifo Working Paper Series 7785, CESifo.
    20. Victor Chernozhukov & Carlos Cinelli & Whitney Newey & Amit Sharma & Vasilis Syrgkanis, 2021. "Long Story Short: Omitted Variable Bias in Causal Machine Learning," Papers 2112.13398, arXiv.org, revised May 2024.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0233775. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: plosone (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.