Economic and Health Consequences of Pesticide Use in Developing Country Agriculture: Discussion

Abstract

The three papers by Antle and Capalbo; Crissman and Cole; and Pingali, Marquez, and Palis are very important papers which make a contribution beyond the pesticide economics literature. They represent what we believe is the best type of microeconomic work-that which starts with collection of primary data to address an important policy issue and then uses an advanced economic tool to analyze the data. Obviously, economic theory is crucial in the design of the study and the derivation of conclusions, but the data and its implications are the main focus of the analysis. As we will argue later, the data reveal some very important insights. These are among the first studies of pesticide-related tradeoffs between productivity and health to collect actual data on behavior. Obvi-