Abstract
We propose a research agenda for studying six basic questions about the impacts of alternate international invasive species control mechanisms on economic agents in a nation such as the USA. The six questions are as follows. First, when can one justify a trade ban as an effective regulatory policy? Second, what are the properties of control rules that vary by port of entry and whether a shipment is viewed as a routine or as a first-time entry? Third, when should a port manager in the USA use information about the dollar value of the products being transported by ships from two exporting firms and the expected time it takes to inspect ships from these two firms to grant preferential treatment to one or the other firm? Fourth, what are some reasonable measures of the trade related risk from invasive species? Fifth, how useful is strategic trade policy as an invasive species management tool? Finally, when analyzing a biological invasion, is it more appropriate to focus on the likelihood of this event or, instead, on the magnitude of the event?
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Notes
The reader will note that a trade ban is, in effect, equivalent to a binding quota under which no imports are allowed.
Relative to importing nations, exporting nations have better information about the care that they have exercised in packing containers, in making sure that containers have not been tampered with, and in inspecting containers and/or ballast water for the presence of invasive species. This is the source of the asymmetric information between exporting and importing nations.
See, for instance, USDA PREISM’s Fiscal 2004 and 2006 Competitive Award Program Descriptions.
To keep the subsequent mathematics simple, we shall take an expansive view of the seaport manager’s duties. In principle, it is possible to separate the task of inspecting cargo from that of inspecting ballast water. However, this separation would add algebraic clutter to the analysis but would not alter the basic point we wish to make. Therefore, in what follows, we shall stick with our expansive view of the seaport manager’s duties.
This kind of model is also known as a non-preemptive priority queuing model.
In this stationary Poisson process, the parameter λ is not a function of time. In other words, there is no time dependence at work here.
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Acknowledgment
Batabyal thanks George Christakos and two anonymous referees for their helpful comments on a previous version of this paper. In addition, he acknowledges financial support from the Gosnell endowment at RIT. The usual disclaimer applies.
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Batabyal, A.A. International aspects of invasive species management: a research agenda. Stoch Environ Res Risk Assess 21, 717–727 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00477-006-0084-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00477-006-0084-z