The persistence of ecological-economic systems: Alternate measures and their properties

A number of ecologists and some economists have commented on the significance of persistence as a stability concept for jointly determined ecological-economic systems. This notwithstanding, the economics and the regional science literatures have paid scant attention to the problem of computing an ecological-economic system's persistence. As such, this paper has two objectives. 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. Received: March 2002/Accepted: September 2002 We thank T. John Kim and anonymous reviewers for their comments on a previous version of this paper. As well, we acknowledge financial support from the Gosnell endowment at RIT. This paper is dedicated to the memory of A.N. Batabyal (1937–2002). The usual disclaimer applies.