Optimal Control of Locusts in Subsistence Farming Areas
Locust swarms hit subsistence-staple-crop-growing households at random and are not privately controllable. An aerial-spraying optimal control model that supports the said households’ liveli-hood at least expected cost is therefore developed. The qualitative properties of the model are analysed under economically plausible but mild assumptions. The steady state comparative stat-ics reveal that the locust swarm size and the probability of a household’s crop being destroyed by a swarm decrease with the number of households, yield per household, and the staple crop’s replacement price, and increase with the marginal cost of spraying and the planner’s discount rate. A local comparative dynamics analysis is also conducted, as it provides the necessary eco-nomic intuition behind other ostensibly anomalous steady state comparative statics results.
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| Length: | 27 pages |
| Date of creation: | 2007 |
| Date of revision: | |
| Handle: | RePEc:uow:depec1:wp07-10 |
| Contact details of provider: | Postal: School of Economics, University of Wollongong, Northfields Avenue, Wollongong NSW 2522 Australia Phone: +612 4221-3659 Fax: +612 4221-3725 Web page: http://business.uow.edu.au/econ/index.html More information through EDIRC
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References listed on IDEAS
Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
- Gershon Feder, 1979. "Pesticides, Information, and Pest Management under Uncertainty," American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, vol. 61(1), pages 97-103.
- Carlson, Gerald A. & Zilberman, David & Miranowski, John, 1993. "Agricultural and Resource Economics," Staff General Research Papers 11104, Iowa State University, Department of Economics.
- Jean-Daniel M. Saphores, 2000. "The Economic Threshold with a Stochastic Pest Population: A Real Options Approach," American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, vol. 82(3), pages 541-555.
- Cowan, Robin & Gunby, Philip, 1996. "Sprayed to Death: Path Dependence, Lock-In and Pest Control Strategies," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 106(436), pages 521-42, May.
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