The Persistence of Ecological-Economic Systems: Alternate Measures and Their Properties

Abstract

Several ecologists and economists have commented on the salience of persistence as a stability concept for jointly determined ecological-economic systems. Even so, the economics and the regional science literatures have paid scant attention to the problem of computing an ecological-economic system's persistence. Therefore, the present paper has two goals. First, we derive three measures of the persistence of a jointly determined ecological-economic system whose temporal behavior is governed by the presence of thresholds. Next, we compare and contrast these three measures. Finally, we discuss their theoretical properties and their practical uses.

Keywords: Ecological-Economic System, Persistence, Stability, Threshold, Uncertainty

JEL Classification: Q20, D81