| Abstract: |
Scientific evidence suggests that anthropogenic impacts on the environment,
such as land-use changes and climate change, promote the emergence of
infectious diseases (IDs) in humans. We provide a synthesis which captures
interactions between the economy and the natural world and links climate,
land-use and IDs. We develop a two-region integrated epidemic-economic model
which unifies short-run disease containment policies with long-run policies
which could control the drivers and the severity of IDs. We structure our
paper by linking susceptible-infected-susceptible and
susceptible-infected-recovered models with an economic model which includes
land-use choices for agriculture, climate change and accumulation of knowledge
that supports land-augmenting technical change. The ID contact number depends
on short-run policies (e.g., lockdowns, vaccination), and long-run policies
affecting land-use, the natural world and climate change. Climate change and
land-use change have an additional cost in terms of IDs since they might
increase the contact number in the long-run. We derive optimal short-run
containment controls for a Nash equilibrium between regions, and long-run
controls for climate policy, land-use, and knowledge at an open loop Nash
equilibrium and the social optimum and unify the short- and long-run controls.
We explore the impact of ambiguity aversion and model misspecification in the
unified model and provide simulations which support the theoretical model. |
| Keywords: |
infectious diseases, SIS and SIR models, natural world, climate change, land-use, containment, Nash equilibrium, OLNE, social optimum, land-augmenting technical change |