Economic Profitability Versus Ecological Entropy

Martin Weitzman

Scholarly Articles from Harvard University Department of Economics

Abstract: There is a long-standing trade-off in bioculture between concentrating on high-yield varieties and maintaining sufficient diversity to lower the risks of catastrophic infection. The paper uses a simple ecology-based model of endogenous disease to indicate how a local decision to plant more of a widely grown crop creates negative externalities by increasing the probability that new pathogens will evolve to attack the crop globally. Society's basic issue concerns where to locate on an efficiency frontier between economic profitability and a standard formula for ecological entropy—proved here to be a rigorous measure of “generalized resistance†to crop-ecosystem failure.

Date: 2000
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (47)

Published in Quarterly Journal of Economics -Cambridge Massachusetts-

Downloads: (external link)
http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/3693703 ... icsProfitability.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Economic Profitability Versus Ecological Entropy (2000)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hrv:faseco:3693703

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Scholarly Articles from Harvard University Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Office for Scholarly Communication ().