Bioeconometrics: Empirical Modeling of Bioeconomic Systems

The rise of ecosystem management as an approach to renewable resource policy increases the demand for empirical bioeconomics. This paper provides a working definition of bioeconometrics and a taxonomy of model types. A bioeconometric model is a structural model that econometrically estimates one or more parameters of a bioeconomic system. Bioeconometric modeltypes include equilibrium, dynamically decoupled, and dynamically coupled. The challenges and importance of bioeconometrics are illustrated with a Monte Carlo analysis of simulated data that attempts to differentiate among six differentqualitative categories in a system characterized by critical depensation. Theanalysis highlights a theme in nonlinear dynamics—that a small quantitative change in a parameter can affect the qualitative dynamics—and shows that the econometrician may know the least empirically about a bioeconomic system when she needs to know the most.