The behavior of plants and other animals is much less so, or not at all. By the way, I am not certain that Jacobs is much better informed about ecology. The works that she cites are mostly journalism or popularizations. She would find that what working ecologists actually do is mainly narrow, technical, and dreary. Many of their methods are in fact borrowed from economics.
Mussels tend to wipe out other species in certain intertidal zones.
Understanding how they do so will not help anyone to understand why some industries take hold and flourish in East Asia, while others merely cling precariously to existence and still others disappear. There is no harm in thinking of industrial succession and survival as an evolutionary process energized by the pressure of selection. The mistake is to believe that this thought comes anywhere near exhausting the intellectual problem. Economic dynamics on this scale is not to be understood without recourse to culturally induced norms of entrepreneurial behavior, the lore of investment banking, the content of popular business-school courses, and many other things not characteristic of mussel populations. I think that every development economist already knew that.