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...