Abstract:
After declining rapidly because of low fish stocks in the early 1970s, the Newfoundland fishery — harvesting and
processing facilities, and employment — expanded severalfold during the four years following adoption of the 200-mile limit.
The expansion collapsed into bankruptcy during the 1981 recession. Through government intervention the industry was saved,
only to collapse again, through stock decimation, a decade later. The growth of the 1970s bore the seeds of the collapse of the
1990s. How did the fishery bureaucracy, politics and economics interact to permit the expansion when it was recognized by
nearly everyone concerned that the fishery was already overcapitalized and that more factors, capital and labor, were not
required to catch and process the increased anticipated harvests?
