Optimal Control of Locusts in Subsistence Farming Areas

Amnon Levy and Michael Caputo

Economics Working Papers from School of Economics, University of Wollongong, NSW, Australia

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: Optimal control; local stability; steady state comparative statics; local comparative dynamics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 27 pages
Date: 2007
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr
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Journal Article: Optimal control of locusts in subsistence farming areas (2008)
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