Inadequate funding from developed countries has hampered international efforts to conserve biodiversity in tropical forests. We present two complementary research approaches that reveal a significant increase in public demand for conservation within tropical developing countries as those countries reach upper-middle-income (UMI) status. We highlight UMI tropical countries because they contain nearly four-fifths of tropical primary forests, which are rich in biodiversity and stored carbon. The first approach is a set of statistical analyses of various cross-country conservation indicators, which suggests that protective government policies have lagged behind the increase in public demand in these countries. The second approach is a case study from Malaysia, which reveals in a more integrated fashion the linkages from rising household income to increased household willingness to pay for conservation, nongovernmental organization activity, and delayed government action. Our findings suggest that domestic funding in UMI tropical countries can play a larger role in (i) closing the funding gap for tropical forest conservation, and (ii) paying for supplementary conservation actions linked to international payments for reduced greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in tropical countries.
We examine the evidence from the long-run abnormal returns using data for 76 health care and biopharmaceutical initial public offerings (IPOs) listed in a 29-year period between 1986 and 2014 in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, the Philippines, Vietnam, Myanmar, and Laos. Based on the event-time approach, the 3-year stock returns of the IPOs are investigated using cumulative abnormal return (CAR) and buy-and-hold abnormal return (BHAR). As a robustness check, the calendar-time approach, related to the market model as well as Fama-French and Carhart models, was applied for verifying long-run abnormal returns. We found evidence that the health care IPOs overperform in the long-run, irrespective of the alternative benchmarks and methods. In addition, when we divide our sample into 5 groups by listing countries, our results show that the health care stock prices of the Singaporean firms behaved differently from those of most of the other firms in ASEAN. The Singaporean IPOs are characterized by a worse post-offering performance, whereas the IPOs of Malaysian and Thai health care companies performed better in the long-run.