Abstract:
The Sustainable Fisheries Act (SFA) and Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries Management require
restoration of fishery resources and a matching of capacity to desired resource levels. There is, thus, a need to reduce
harvesting capacity throughout many of the fisheries of the world. Yet, even the term capacity is not well defined, and it is
even more complicated to measure. In this paper, we introduce several definitions and measures of capacity that are
consistent with economic theory and empirical analyses. Since economic data on production activities are usually
unavailable, we introduce the concept of data envelopment analysis (DEA) which may be used to calculate a physical or
primal-based concept of capacity in fisheries. We initially introduce DEA and dispel many of the myths believed to be
problems of DEA. We discuss how DEA may be used to calculate capacity in single and multiple-species fisheries. We
