The concept of rents has a venerable history in economic theory. In his fundamental work on the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith defined the concept making it clear that rents were distinct from profits. Ricardo, building on the foundation laid by Adam Smith, similarly distinguished between profits and rents in...
Discount rates, it is well-known, play an important role in the determining optimal extraction paths for natural resources. In fisheries analysis, as well as other natural resource use, constant discount rates are customarily assumed. In practical applications, the constant discount rate is often taken to be the social rate of...
Fish farming has grown very rabidly during the past few decades. One component of this expansion is the introduction of new species, previously unknown to most consumers, to world markets. Arctic char, a cold water salmonid, is one of these species. In 1987, the total commercial supply only amounted to...
The hilsa shad (Tenualosa ilisha) fishery is the largest single species fishery of Bangladesh managed under open access system was chosen for the study. The purpose of the study was to develop optimal policy to assess the optimal exploitation of the fishery. The objective was to maximize the net benefit...
In 2009 the World Bank published a study of the economic performance of the global marine fishery pertaining to the base year 2004. The key finding of this study was that the global fishery in 2004 was economically and biologically highly inefficient. More precisely, the difference between attainable and actual...
To run the ITQ system as well as other components of the fisheries management system, the Icelandic government conducts a number of activities which may be regarded as fisheries management services. The most important of these are performed by (i) the Fisheries Directorate which maintains the quota registry and enforces...
Many ITQ fisheries are subject to an upper limit or cap on ITQ-holdings by individual companies. The economic rationale for these caps seems to be to reduce the opportunities for monopolistic behaviour by the companies. A possible social cost of the caps is that limiting company size in fisheries, especially...
ITQ systems generate ITQ prices. For any given ITQ-managed species there are typically two prices. One is for the annual (or seasonal) quota, the other is for the longer lasting ITQ-share. In well-functioning ITQ markets, these prices reveal important information about the fishery. In the single species framework, prices of...
Atmospheric measurements show that so-called greenhouse gases have been accumulating in the
Earth’s atmosphere for well over a century. There are strong indications that human activity
plays a significant role in this process. One consequence of the accumulation of greenhouse
gases is thought to be an increase in global temperatures...
If fisheries management is supposed to affect behaviour, it has to be enforced. Fisheries
enforcement has generally been found to be quite costly compared to the attainable rents from
the fishery. This has a number of important implications. First, obviously, it is economically
important to operate the enforcement activity at...
It is now widely recognized that property rights based fisheries management regimes are well
suited for generating efficiency in fisheries. Apart from access licences, which are very low
quality property rights, individual quotas (IQs) and individual transferable quotas (ITQs) are the
most widely applicable and, indeed, the most commonly applied...
The concept of natural resource rents is much used in the natural resource and fisheries
economics literature. It is therefore somewhat surprising that in this same literature it is difficult
to find a clear definition of either natural resource rents or fisheries rents. Possibly, as a result,
the concept is...
Historically, the fishery has been the mainstay of the Newfoundland economy. Inevitably, its importance declined as
economic development proceeded, but was still quite substantial at the time of Confederation with Canada in 1949.
Since then, however, the census figures show a precipitous decline in the role of the fishery in...
It is often taken for granted that taxation of rents is economically nondistortive. In certain areas of natural resource use, e.g. oil extraction and fisheries, this nondistortion principle has been used to justify taxation of what is regarded as resource rents. This paper challenges the view that such taxation is...
It has been established that the path of a fishery over time, i.e. stocks, fleets, effort and profits, depends inter alia on the enforcement of the fisheries management rules in place. It has further been established that optimal enforcement of fisheries management rules depends inter alia on the shadow value...
When fishers can avoid detection and/or sanctions for violating fisheries management rules, the fisheries enforcement problem becomes substantially more complicated. A number of issues immediately pop up. First, the effectiveness of enforcement effort is reduced. This, ceteris paribus, reduces the optimal enforcement effort. Second, the impact on the fishery of...
The sustainable yield function is a favoured tool in fisheries policy making. Normally, this function is drawn as a continuous curve in effort-yield space. This means that sustainable yield (harvest) is gradually reduced to zero as fishing effort increases. This, however, does not have to be the case. The sustainable...
According to conventional economic wisdom the economically more efficient technology will always outcompete the less efficient. This hypothesis has usually been taken to hold for the exploitation of common pool renewable natural resources such as fish stocks. This paper claims that, while this is not necessarily false, it may be...
The hilsa shad (Tenualosa ilisha) fishery is by far the largest single species fishery in Bangladesh. In this paper, a simple bio-economic year-class based model is developed to describe the fishery and examine its properties. With the help of this model, the optimum sustainable yield of the fishery is calculated...
This paper estimates current resource rents being generated in the Icelandic cod fishery and compares them to the maximum sustainable attainable ones. For this purpose a simple aggregative model of the cod fishery is specified and empirically estimated. It is found that in spite of the cod stock being in...
Trends in key fisheries indicators are presented to provide the context for a profile of the economic health of the world's marine fisheries. Estimates of the economic value of global marine fishery production and costs of production are used as inputs to an economic model to derive a range of...