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.