Relação entre desmatamento e despesas públicas com gestão ambiental nos estados da Amazônia Legal (2005 a 2015)

Abstract

Tropical forests play a key role in providing the natural resources and, consequently, the services necessary to maintain life. According to the report of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, it is estimated that between 1990 and 2015 the planet's forest cover was reduced from 31.6% to 30.6%. Brazil, while holding the largest tropical forest in the world, the Amazon Forest, plays a fundamental role in the preservation of forests. The preservation of these resources is carried out through public policies of command and control aimed at environmental preservation. The implementation of these policies occurs through the allocation of budgetary resources to the expenditure by environmental management function. In this sense, the objective of this study is to analyze the relationship between government expenditures with environmental management in the states of the Legal Amazon and the deforestation of the Amazon in the period from 2005 to 2015. A comparative analysis was then carried out between the expenditure on environmental management and deforestation rates in the Legal Amazon, in order to understand how its temporal evolution occurred. To understand the real effect of deforestation on environmental management expenditure, a panel analysis for fixed effects was carried out using Logit 4.0 Software. The results showed that deforestation did not have a significant effect on environmental management expenditure during the study period. The fact that deforestation does not have a significant effect demonstrates the low importance attributed to it by the states that make up the Legal Amazon. This could be observed through the elasticity analysis in which a one percent increase in deforestation rate implied an increase in environmental management expenditure of around 0,026%. On the other hand, the variables considered being drivers of deforestation, in the case of GDP per capita, transport, agriculture and education expenditures have shown statistical significance to explain environmental management expenditure. It was possible to observe that the increase of one percent in the expenses with education, agriculture and transport caused the increase in the expense with environmental management in about 1,0828%, 0,4764% and 0,8326%, respectively. In this sense, the present study found that government expenditure by function has a greater effect on environmental management expenditure when compared to deforestation.