Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2016
Entomologists and other pest control specialists recognize that pest mobility creates difficulties when control is left to individual property owners. Control of mobile weeds, insects or contagious diseases has characteristics of a public good with high exclusion costs and near equal availability to all people in the affected area. If abatement benefits for areas to which the pest is spreading are not considered, there will be under production of abatement. Cooperatives, county abatement districts or state and federal agencies are often set up to administer area-wide abatement efforts. Economies of scale in pesticide treatments, coordination of efforts to limit spatial spread of the pest (quarantine activities) and scale economies in technology to reduce adverse side effects of pesticides are given as justifications for public or large-scale pest control programs.
Paper No. 4733 of the Journal series of the North Carolina Agricultural Experiment Station. The use of trade names in this publication does not imply endorsement by the North Carolina Agricultural Experiment Station of the products named nor criticisms of similar ones not mentioned. Without implicating them the assistance of Fred Arnold, Dick Axtell, Dave Hyman and Tom Johnson is acknowledged.