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

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