Marco regulatório sobre pagamento por serviços ambientais no Brasil

Diante da crescente pressão sobre os ecossistemas, várias instituições e governos têm buscado criar incentivos para melhoria da gestão do patrimônio ambiental. Nesse sentido, políticas de Pagamentos por Serviços Ambientais (PSA) têm sido apontadas ao redor do mundo como uma opção viável para alcançar esse objetivo, complementando ações de comando e controle. No Brasil, vários estados têm adotado leis de PSA e há uma progressiva discussão para adoção de uma lei nacional sobre o tema. Diante disso, o Imazon e o GVces conduziram este estudo com o objetivo de mapear e analisar leis sobre PSA em âmbito federal e estadual no Brasil, enfocando em serviços ambientais ligados a florestas. Analisamos também os principais Projetos de Lei (PL) em trâmite no Congresso Nacional sobre PSA e sobre Redução de Emissões por Desmatamento e Degradação Florestal e o papel da conservação, manejo e aumento de estoque florestal (REDD+).

Parceria empresarial pelos serviços ecossistêmicos

A PESE destina-se a promover novas estratégias de negócios que aliem o desempenho empresarial à gestão sustentável dos ecossistemas.

Slide falado

Ao comentar este infográfico, a gestora da iniciativa Tendências em Serviços Ecossistêmicos (TeSE), Natalia Lutti Hummel, explica como se dá a relação entre os serviços prestados pelos ecossistemas e o bem estar humano

Essays on health care reform, wealth inequality, and demography

This thesis contains three chapters. The first chapter uses a general equilibrium framework to simulate and compare the long run effects of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) and of health care costs reduction policies on macroeconomic variables, government budget, and welfare of individuals. We found that all policies were able to reduce uninsured population, with the PPACA being more effective than cost reductions. The PPACA increased public deficit mainly due to the Medicaid expansion, forcing tax hikes. On the other hand, cost reductions alleviated the fiscal burden of public insurance, reducing public deficit and taxes. Regarding welfare effects, the PPACA as a whole and cost reductions are welfare improving. High welfare gains would be achieved if the U.S. medical costs followed the same trend of OECD countries. Besides, feasible cost reductions are more welfare improving than most of the PPACA components, proving to be a good alternative. The second chapter documents that life cycle general equilibrium models with heterogeneous agents have a very hard time reproducing the American wealth distribution. A common assumption made in this literature is that all young adults enter the economy with no initial assets. In this chapter, we relax this assumption – not supported by the data – and evaluate the ability of an otherwise standard life cycle model to account for the U.S. wealth inequality. The new feature of the model is that agents enter the economy with assets drawn from an initial distribution of assets. We found that heterogeneity with respect to initial wealth is key for this class of models to replicate the data. According to our results, American inequality can be explained almost entirely by the fact that some individuals are lucky enough to be born into wealth, while others are born with few or no assets. The third chapter documents that a common assumption adopted in life cycle general equilibrium models is that the population is stable at steady state, that is, its relative age distribution becomes constant over time. An open question is whether the demographic assumptions commonly adopted in these models in fact imply that the population becomes stable. In this chapter we prove the existence of a stable population in a demographic environment where both the age-specific mortality rates and the population growth rate are constant over time, the setup commonly adopted in life cycle general equilibrium models. Hence, the stability of the population do not need to be taken as assumption in these models.