Collective management of communicable endemic animal diseases: developing a bio-economic framework

This article aims to develop a general framework for the study of collective management of communicable endemic animal diseases. Starting from a review of the economic literature on on-farm control of animal diseases and on the impact of collective strategies to control animal diseases, we show that taking both the epidemiology of the disease and the individual decision into account is justified when individual decisions lead to an externality and when the spread of the disease has an impact on individual decision, leading to an interaction between farmers' decisions and epidemiology. The authors propose to couple bio-economic models with an epidemiological model and a decision model in order to analyze the impact of individual decisions, and to assess the impact of incentives schemes.