Toward a Unified Economic Theory of Fire Program Analysis with Strategies for Empirical Modeling

Abstract

Recent United States federal wildland fire policy documents including the 2001 policy update (US Department of Agriculture and US Department of the Interior 2001) call for integrated approaches to the national fire program. An important theme of these inter-agency policies is to encourage planning and budgeting across the major fire program components (e.g., suppression, fuels, prevention) in a consistent way. This means, for example, that planning and budgeting for the fuels (suppression) component is informed by the planning and budgeting of the suppression (fuels) component. In this chapter we specify the economic structure of a planning and budgeting system, as opposed to a component-by-component analysis. This structure shows, for example, that budgeting a federal system by program component is unlikely to promote efficiency. The structure also shows that the components can be managed in concert to capitalize on the complementary impacts they are likely to have on each other.