Two Theoretical Issues Concerning the Differential Treatment of Trading Partners in Alien Species Management

Abstract

The risk of unintentional biological invasions in a nation typically varies by trading partner. Because this recognition has been very recent, several theoretical issues concerning the differential treatment of trading partners in alien species management remain inadequately studied. Therefore, we use a dynamic and stochastic framework to shed light on two such issues in this paper. First, we compute the arrival rate functions of ships entering a seaport in a country called Home from N possible nations when the individual ship arrival rates can fluctuate over time. Second, for any arbitrary time t, we calculate the probability distribution function of the number of inspectors in the Home seaport who are busy inspecting the arriving ships from the N potential nations.

Keywords: Alien Species, Differential Treatment, Inspection, Maritime, Trade, Risk

JEL Classification: F18, Q20, Q56