Agriculture, pesticides and the ecosystem

General equilibrium analysis provided economists with a good understanding of intraeconomy interdependence and a mature and powerful methodology of modeling it. When it became evident that economic activities had detrimental effects on ecological systems (ecosystems, for short), environmental economics developed as a branch of externality theory which, however, focuses on environment-economy interactions often in a rudimentary way only. On the other hand, natural scientists developed models of species interactions in ecosystems (population ecology), and they also study the impact of economic activities on ecosystems but anthropogenic distortions enter their analysis often as exogenous parameter shocks only. It appears, therefore, that in their studies of environment-economy interactions both disciplines, ecology and economics, are biased in opposite directions: Ecologists tend to disregard the complexity of the economic system and economists tend to neglect ecosystem complexity.