The diversity impact of democracy on forest protection: Global evidence

This research mainly examines the influence of democracy on forest protection by employing an estimation of generalized method of moments (GMM) and data on 111 countries during the period 1991-2018. The empirical results suggest that democracies tend to do better at forest protection, which is supported when we conduct several robustness tests. If the regimes transform from lower democratic to higher democratic, then this is also beneficial for forest protection. Although liberal democracy, electoral democracy, participatory democracy, and deliberative democracy promote forest protection, egalitarian democracy does not bring about the forest pro-tection. Additionally, better control of corruption strengthens the positive effect of democracy on forest pro-tection, while the utilization of renewable energy, trade globalization, and business freedom weaken it. Finally, parliamentary democracies and majoritarian democracies are more likely to protect forests than presidential democracies or proportional democracies.