Using cultural heritage sites in Mexico to understand the poverty alleviation impacts of protected areas

Win-win outcomes between biodiversity conservation and local economic development are now a goal of many governments and conservation organizations but can be difficult to achieve. Where they occur, reductions in poverty from protected areas are often thought to be driven by economic gains from tourism that are sufficient to outweigh losses due to restrictions on land-use or resource extraction. However, evidence about this channel is scarce. In this paper, we explore the potential compensatory effect of tourism by comparing poverty alleviation outcomes for cultural heritage sites in Mexico across two decades from 1990 to 2010. These sites are similar to protected areas in terms of attracting tourists, but they do not impose substantial restrictions on local land or resource use, allowing us to isolate tourism as a possible channel for economic development. Overall, we find mixed evidence that proximity to cultural heritage sites is associated with poverty reduction. During the first study period (1990-2000), localities close to cultural heritage sites saw reduced poverty of 0.034 standard deviations for each additional site. However, during the second period (2000-2010), localities close to heritage sites saw less poverty reduction than the comparison group (-0.014 standard deviations for each additional site). In both periods, poverty alleviation effects were not consistently correlated with the total number of visitors, but were larger further from cities, where baseline poverty was higher, and in the Yucatan Peninsula. This heterogeneity indicates that variability in the ability of local communities to capture benefits from tourism depends on a particular combination of institutional and geographic factors-as was the case in the Yucatan peninsula, where cultural heritage sites had consistent poverty alleviation effects over two decades.