The economics of area-wide pest managemen

This dissertation develops an analytical framework for the evaluation of pest control approaches against mobile pests, focusing on two alternative schemes: conventional pest management based on a farm-by-farm basis and area-wide pest management based on a regional basis (APM).;It first develops a static bioeconomic model with two heterogeneous farmers attacked by a common pest to solve for the pest management solutions for farm-by-farm pest management, pest management via private negotiation, pest management with Pigouvian subsidy, and pubic pest management in forms of APM. The analytical results show that area-wide pest management is a potential mechanism to improve the efficiency of pest management in the control of mobile pests.;It then extends the static model into an optimal dynamic control model with N heterogeneous farmers, regarding pest as a reproductive pollutant. The analytical results again demonstrate that APM is more efficient than farm-by-farm pest management. With the extended model, it continues to analyze farmers' strategic behaviors in pest management, using game theory. The study results demonstrate that a one-off pest control event could be an effective instrument to induce farmers' adaptation of APM.;It also investigates the influence of key parameters and factors on the economic viability of APM with the two theoretical models. The study results show that high pest mobility, few farmers and small damage heterogeneity would enhance the economic viability of APM. However, the effect of the size of the treated area on the economic viability of APM is ambiguous.;After analyzing the economic viability of APM from the theoretical perspective, this dissertation moves to provide an analytical framework for assessing the empirical economic viability of APM, in the case of a small open economy with transport cost. The potential benefits of APM are measured at the market level, in terms producer surplus and consumer surplus. For the illustrative purpose, it applies this model to evaluate the Hawaii Area-Wide Fruit Fly Integrated Pest Management Program (HAW-FLYPM).;This dissertation thus provides a complete and coherent framework to analyze area-wide pest management from both the theoretical perspective and the empirical perspective.