Closed areas are often used as either temporary or permanent measures to reduce fishing pressure on stocks. A major concern, however, is what happens to the effort that was previously employed in these areas. When modelling the potential impacts of the closed areas, it is necessary to model changes in...
Fisheries management is characterised by multiple objectives. However, seldomly do bioeconomic models incorporate more than one or possibly two key objectives, typically profit and employment, into an analysis. There are both practical and technical reasons for this. This study considers the incorporation of eight key objectives into a bioeconomic analysis...
Recently, there has been an increasing interest among researchers on efficiency in fisheries. They have not just been focused on the analysis of the efficiency itself but also for other purposes as measures of capacity utilisation. However, often, efficiency analyses do not offer clear results regarding the sources of the...
The International Plan of Action for the Management of Fishing Capacity (IPOA-Capacity) was introduced in 1999 in response to growing concerns about excessive levels of fishing capacity and its impact on global fisheries resources. While debate in academic circles has focused on appropriate ways in which to measure capacity, the...
In the UK, individual quotas are imposed on the demersal whitefish trawl fleet. Many of the key whitefish stocks are at historically low levels, and there is pressure on the industry to adjust to remove the current excess capacity. Adjustment in the fishery is likely to favour vessels that are...
Australian Commonwealth fisheries have adopted maximum economic yield as a target reference point. A bioeconomic model has been developed for one key fishery - the Northern Prawn Fishery - and is used in the provision of management advice. The development and application of this model has highlighted some challenges for...
Technical efficiency (TE) measures the relationship between a vessel’s inputs to the fishing process and its outputs, with full efficiency being achieved when outputs are maximised from a given set of inputs. Inputs can be physical (e.g. the vessel, gear, engine, onboard equipment, etc.), flexible (time spent fishing, size of...
Fishers are faced with multiple risks, including unpredictability of future catch rates, prices and costs. While the latter are largely beyond the control of fisheries managers, effective fisheries management should reduce uncertainty about future catches while also enhancing profitability. Different management instruments are likely to have different impacts on the...
Differences in technical efficiency of fishing vessels are often attributed to skipper skill and differences in technology. While the later can be defined in terms of the technology employed, the former is more difficult to quantify. In this paper, the contribution of technology and skipper characteristics (e.g. level of education,...
With international efforts to develop ecosystem-based management of ocean uses, there has been a growing call for the development of integrated assessment tools, including the design of models which can be used to identify possible futures and evaluate alternative management strategies. Along with this, there is increasing recognition that such...