Fisheries is not the only discipline where models have been used in attempts to fine tune an aspect of the economy. Such fine tuning can prove ineffective because of the uncertainties in the scientific underpinnings of the models and because of the omission of critical elements. In fisheries, the biological...
We describe the first effort at creating a global ex-vessel fish price database. We then demonstrate potential applications of the database by linking it to the Sea Around Us project's spatially defined catch database, which makes it possible to attach catch values to species both in time and space. There...
This paper analyses the state of demersal fisheries in the North and Central Adriatic Sea (FAO Geographical Sub Area (GSA) 17) from an economic and social point of view. The analysis is performed using a set of 25 socio-economic indicators. Indicators represent a valid tool to support the decision making...
The use and management of fish supplies, fish stocks and those who work in fishing and related businesses needs to be governed by good policies and actions, based as far as possible on good research-based advice and other expert information. Fisheries policy makers and managers work in a milieu that...
Fisheries regulations on fishing capacity are usually based on a nominal measurement such as limiting number of vessels of a fleet. However, the nominal measurement of fishing capacity has difficulty in capturing the actual fishing power enhanced by technological changes and potentially leads to biased measures on fishing capacity and...
The economic results of fishing harbours are a key issue for the sustainability of coastal economies. To deal with it, three harbour branches need to be analysed : the suppliers of goods and services, the fishing companies and the trading actors. The compatible state with constraints, various interactions and behaviours...
Indicators of the economic performance of fishing vessels are frequently computed in many countries. Usually, measures of economic performance are based on the return on capital invested. However, several measures of capital value exist, according to the economic information available. In this paper, we use different types of information to...
Traditional productivity measures have been much less prevalent than other measures of economic and biological performance in fisheries economics. It has been increasingly recognized, however, that modeling and measuring fisheries' production relationships is central to understanding and ultimately correcting the repercussions of externalities and poorly designed regulations. We use a...
At the 2001 WTO Ministerial Conference in Doha, World Trade Ministers called for improved disciplines on fisheries subsidies, given the perceived impact of these subsidies in contributing to overfishing, overcapacity and other trade distortions. Subsequent deliberations have sought to determine which fisheries subsidies should be disciplined under the WTO framework....
The concept of an ecosystem approach to fisheries management (EAF) is reaching a point of general acceptance by those involved in fisheries. There is also growing agreement that fisheries management must incorporate the complicated and often not-well-understood links between human activities and the environment. As a primary goal of an...
The increasing move to citizen participation in policy formulation is being witnessed in European fisheries. The emergence of the Regional Advisory Councils (RACs) and other processes via the reformed Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) is sparking hope and interest in more regionally relevant, holistic, and hopefully workable fisheries management measures. In...
Why are fisheries policies so hard to reform? While there are many examples of successful policy reform in the sector, these tend to be restricted to a few countries or individual fisheries. There remains significant scope for further reform to address pressing economic, environmental and social issues in the sector....
Earlier this year a White Paper from the Norwegian Minister of the Environment presented a new, holistic, area-based management plan for the Norwegian part of the Barents Sea, including the Fishery protection zone around Svalbard. The plan will provide guidelines for managing human activities in relation to their use and...
Restrictions on flows of foreign direct investment (FDI) in most sectors of OECD countries have been significantly reduced in recent years. In contrast, FDI in the fish harvesting sectors of OECD countries is still heavily restricted through a range of measures including outright bans on FDI, maximum allowable levels of...
The New Zealand Ministry of Fisheries recently set out a strategic approach to managing the adverse effects of fishing on the aquatic environment. The primary purpose of this Strategy for Managing the Environmental Effects of Fishing (SMEEF) is to set out how the Ministry of Fisheries will meet its environmental...
Commercial property rights in New Zealand are designed to address utilisation and sustainability issues relating to single-stock management. However, commercial property rights may not provide incentives that address environmental impacts of fishing if these impacts do not affect the value of the property right. But is it really that simple?...
The outcome of the current multilateral trade negotiations in the Doha Round will have large implications on international fish trade. The author highlights the most likely scenarios in areas such as market access and fisheries subsidies, and outlines the very diverse interests and negotiation positions of WTO members.
The inability to find a solution – acceptable to sufficient stakeholders to achieve political agreement - to effectively adjust fisheries resources management systems and sector policies lies at the heart of most overexploitation tragedies. For developing countries the application of a technological approach - focusing on rights, maximizing single, economic...
New Zealand manages commercial access and allocation through the market-based Quota Management System (QMS). However, the QMS alone is currently insufficient to address several fisheries issues. New Zealand is now developing Objectives-Based Fisheries Management (OBFM) to complement the QMS along two dimensions. First, to improve fisheries outcomes, such as reduced...
This paper begins by outlining the history of the Rules of Origin negotiations in the World Trade Organization (WTO), unfinished business from the Uruguay Round that is separate from the current Doha Round. The treatment of products of the sea is one of a large number of unresolved issues; progress...
On the morning of 29 August 2005, Southeast Louisiana was decimated by the winds and flood surge associated with Hurricane Katrina. Shortly thereafter, Hurricane Rita played havoc on the Southwestern part of the state. Louisiana's commercial seafood industry, already on the decline for a number of reasons, including declining output...
The financial performance of the UK fishing fleet has been directly affected by high prices for diesel fuel. As a result, the fishing industry has been faced with an urgent need to reduce their dependency on fuel oil. The UK Sea Fish Industry Authority (Seafish) is leading a project part-funded...
Because of wild salmon's importance as a commercial fishery in North America, many questions and concerns have been raised around the issue of farmed versus wild salmon in recent years. Concerns have been related to the impact of the tremendous growth in farmed salmon production on the markets for wild...
Climate change and climate-induced changes are expected to increase in the future and are likely to cause adverse impacts, especially on aquatic resources and coastal communities, by affecting the productivity and distribution of fish stocks. This will have serious implications on future demand and supply of fish at the global...
Maximizing profit and value added are central objectives when fishing rights are distributed. Financial profitability on a company level traditionally measures the return on total assets. Value added on the national level is the net (or gross) national product, and is the total profit of investments and wages and salaries...
To the surprise of government as well as NGOs, village-level caste organizations - or panchayats - played a significant role in the post-tsunami relief effort to fishermen in Tamil Nadu, India. This paper discusses the pro-active role of caste panchayats in relief from the perspective of social resilience, that is...
This paper, that follows from the ongoing Ecost project, departs from the reality of marine biodiversity degradation in the Caribbean. It first enquires how local fishing communities appreciate and measure the degradation of marine biodiversity. In this connection, it asks whether communities have social and cultural attachments to particular species....
The wide expanse of the sea, the inter-linkages among, and the productivity of its resources have until recently led most researchers to consider it unrealistic that humans could have more than local impact on marine ecosystems and their biodiversity. This perception is changing, however, as more evidence of the scale...
A rapid increase in the Thai trawl and push net fisheries had led to over fishing and thus fishery resource degradation. Catch per unit effort decreased from over 300 kg/hr in the past 30 years to less than 20 kg/hr recently. The impact has placed a greater burden on coastal...
Overcapacity situations appear regularly in the activity of marine natural resource exploitation. The measure of capacity utilisation and allocative efficiency for fishing vessels is an approach that can determine the details of that overcapacity. On the one hand, DEA (Data Envelopment Analysis) methodology can be used in the case of...
World fisheries are characterized by ecological, economic and social costs which are not taken into account by current market mechanisms. However the sustainability of ecosystems and fishing activities depends on their taking into account in order to take the most suitable management decisions. Based on the consilience concept, the European...
The 2005 Gulf of Mexico hurricanes devastated not only fishing boats but also many businesses interdependent with fishermen: processing plants, ice plants, boat builders, net makers and other suppliers. Fuel prices and other expenses have increased. Wholesale catch prices are down due to damaged markets, lack of storage facilities and,...
Under the provisions of the United Nations Convention for the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), coastal states must provide for access to harvest the living resources within their EEZs. Where the state does not have the capacity to harvest the entire sustainable catch, it must grant other states access to...
Managed fisheries are frequently structured on a sector by sector basis with each sector defined by the type of user or use, for example commercial, recreational and indigenous sectors. Management arrangements for a sector, however, may not be formally integrated with those for other sectors. Consequent competition between sectors for...
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 this paper, we illustrate characteristics of food system of tuna by making a bird’s-eye view of tuna
trade and global distribution. Tuna resources are primarily consumed as canned tuna or Sashimi (=raw
fish). The fishing methods and species predetermine the food system of the caught fish. Among seven
tuna...
This paper considers the modelling of aggregate price and quantity of aquaculture production in
the European countries since mid-80s. In general, the evolution of aquaculture production only
considers the evolution of total value and total weight. The heterogeneity of aquaculture
production is neglected. As a consequence, the unit value ('price')...
Resource rentals can be viewed as taxes on scarcity rents or as fees for access to use or utilize the
resource. The Icelandic Fishery Management Act requires that vessel owners pay a Catch fee
(Veiðigjald). This paper discusses how the Catch fee is defined by the Fishery Management Act.
Secondly...
The animal protein intake in Nigeria is grossly insufficient yet the retail price of fish is rising. Market intermediaries, alleged to charge excessive and unjustifiable marketing margins (MM), are often blamed for this. This study examines this allegation using data from 225 sun-dried fish traders classified into three groups. Data...
Maximum sustainable yield (MSY) has been recommended as a reference point for fisheries sustainability. However, like other reference points it is generally applied on a single-species basis. This has potentially significant biological implications in a complex multispecies fishery. MSY-based reference points also have economic implications for fisheries prosecuting the resource....
Fisheries managers around the world have identified bycatch as a key management challenge in fisheries today. However, like the classic common property open-access problem in fisheries, a limit on fleet-wide bycatch may have similar consequences for fishing practices since bycatch is a common property open-access resource. If avoiding bycatch is...
This is a study on economic implications of the 3 year harvest control rule (HCR) for the Northeast Arctic
cod stock, decided in November 2002 by the Joint Norwegian-Russian Fisheries Commission. Outcomes
of this rule are compared to those of five other rules, including the previous one based on a...
Accounting for endangered and protected sea turtle interactions with the pelagic longline fishery by the fishery management has become an important policy goal recently. A multi-objective programming model for Hawaii's longline fishery that incorporated sea turtle interactions (Pradhan and Leung, in press, Ecological Economics) has been extended with spatial and...
European eel (Anguilla anguilla) is one of the most important commercial species in France (eel larvae (glass eel) exports to Asia valuing more than 60 million euros in 2005) but also an endangered species with regard to the dropping recruitment. This species is particularly sensitive to oceanographic and climatic factors...
With the increase of population and depletion of fisheries resources due to loss of fish growing land to agriculture, siltation, etc it became necessary to develop an institutional set-up for fisheries education and research. A number of educational institutes have been established in Bangladesh and every year a number of...
In many salt-water recreational settings an imprecise measure of site choice is often collected based upon the individual's launch-point. For anglers who continue on from the launch-point in a boat, this imprecise measure of site choice is likely missing important on-water trade-offs thereby affecting the accuracy of recreational benefit measures...
Great efforts have been made in order to manage the fisheries more sustainably, but so far, most of these efforts have failed. This is putting the welfare of current and future generations at risk. The fishing fleets have catching capacity that well exceeds the rate at which ecosystems can produce...
Seafood is a staple for most Sri Lankans and the country is a net importer of seafood, because of the
heavy consumption. Tsunami has had crippled the Sri Lanka’s main protein supply system and
thousands of others in marketing chain lost their jobs. The main focus of the study was...
Global warming is expected to affect the ecosystem in the Northeast Atlantic, and sufficient changes will also affect
the aquaculture industry. Farming of salmon and trout is the biggest aquaculture industry in Norway. The export
value was about 2 billion US dollars in 2005. The objective of the paper is...
Waterways that are used for boating (both for recreation and commercial fishing) are increasingly being constrained out of concern for boater safety, the habitat and habitat-dependent stocks and wildlife. In Southwest Florida, a primary species of concern is the West Indian manatee, which is currently listed as an endangered species....
Fisheries co-management is now well-established in the literature as a fisheries governance approach (e.g., Wilson et al, 2003; Hanna, 2003; Pomeroy et al, 2001). While co-management regimes have historically developed from the amalgamation of traditional community management with government authority (e.g., Acheson, 2003; Makino, 2005) However, another key insight is...
"Slipper skippers", "absentee landlord" or "absentee ownership", "fleet separation policy"... All these expressions describe a single feature: the separation between two economic functions, ownership (who gets the right to access the resource) and production (who exerts the right). This issue is considered as highly sensitive in several places, such as...
This work analyses empirically the exploitation dynamics from 1997 to 2003, of the most important
segment of the Spanish fishing fleet operating in the EU waters, also known as “300 fleet”. The aim of the
analysis is exploring the economic consequences of the coming into force of the new approaches...
According to the objective of stock recovery defined at the summit of Johannesburg, the optimal management of fisheries requires adequacy between the available resource and fishing capacity. However, matching this objective with another goal of economic and social sustainability is also of major importance. Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) methods are...
The federal and state governments have many different roles to play in addressing the regional impacts of hurricanes. Ranging from hurricane prediction and preparedness to damage assessment and economic recovery, the role of the federal government is one of ensuring human safety and providing for the protection of private property....
A number of simulations have been carried out to study different management scenarios in the Barents Sea cod fisheries when implementing physical and biological effects of global warming. A regional representation of the IPCC SPRES B2 scenario (world region OECD90) has been obtained through the REMO5.1 model. Water temperatures and...
Any model of an exploited ecosystem necessarily includes a representation of fisheries activity as argument(s) of the function(s) describing the state of the ecosystem. Hence the definition of this argument (e.g. effective fishing effort(s), fishing mortalities, Yields&) mainly results from the chosen ecosystem model, with a dimension generally equal to...
An economic assessment of the commercial harvesting sector, seafood processing and distribution
sectors, charter boats for hire, livebait boats and dealer houses, marinas, support facilities, and
recreational boats was undertaken in Mississippi to determine the level of damage sustained as a
result of Hurricane Katrina. The devastation by this hurricane...
Hundreds of coastal communities located in Phang-nga Bay were exacerbated by Tsunami explosion. Fishers and fish
cage farmers accidentally lost their means of fishing and culturing operations to stabilize their conventional
livelihoods. The article is placed with two objectives in order to simply describe the re-building of coastal community
for...
This paper reports on an economic experiment conducted to examine the nature of rent dissipation in limited entry fisheries with aggregate quotas, and factors affecting fishermen's political support for changing to individual quota management. The experimental subjects are fishermen who participate in a series of fishing seasons. The experiment assumes...
Four commercial fisheries off Alaska’s coast are managed by transferable quota systems. Implementation
of each quota program was controversial, and two programs were mandated by federal legislation rather
than standard rulemaking procedure. Pacific halibut and sablefish are managed by individual harvest
quota programs, which were designed to maintain a predominantly...
The 2004 and 2005 hurricane seasons have been particularly devastating to the Gulf Coast region of the U.S. During 2004, hurricanes Charley and Ivan, among others, took dead aim at the Florida Gulf coast and caused excessive structural damage to residences and near-shore structures. These storms in general missed the...
Overcapacity in the form of excess fishing vessels or effort allocation often arises out of improved economic conditions and/or innovation in fishing methods and is generally associated with species overexploitation. With many fisheries fully or over-exploited, stakeholders are advocating product enhancement to add value to the fishery. A recent innovation...
While the need to solve problems of overcapitalization and excess investment in fisheries is now broadly
admitted, very little information exists on the level of capitalization and the structure of capital invested in
the fishing sector. This paper presents the first results of a research program aiming at assessing the...
Within the fisheries literature there has been a growing interest in obtaining estimates of fisheries production in order to determine vessel specific measures of technical efficiency that may be used to estimate the capacity of the fleet. Given that many data sets are panels there has arisen a growing need...
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...
Ocean temperatures are expected to rise over the next decades. This is likely to affect the distribution of fish stocks between the exclusive economic zones (EEZs) of different countries. Such changes are likely to be triggered as temperatures rise beyond certain threshold levels, and they are likely to be irregular,...
The current Senate Bill to reauthorize the Magnuson/Stevens Act, the key US fishery management law,
will allow some significant changes in the way that Individual Transferable Quota programs can be
developed. First, the bill will expand the range of individuals who will be permitted to obtain harvesting
privileges. In addition...
To empirically study production structure and the capacity level at which vessels are harvesting, a short-run
translog cost function is estimated. From the estimated parameters, two capacity utilisation measures
are calculated (returns to scale and a dual capacity utilisation measure). Empirical results show that there
is no excess capacity in...
The eastern Georges Bank haddock resource is shared and managed by the U.S. and Canada through a transboundary resource sharing agreement. This agreement includes an annual process for joint stock assessment, setting of a TAC, and harvest shares for each country. The resource sharing agreement provides a mechanism for establishing...
NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) was a key participant in the FAO technical and policy-level consultations of 1991-1999 that led to the FAO International Plan of Action for the Management of Fishing Capacity. The U.S. Plan of Action includes a commitment to prepare regular assessments of overcapacity in federally-managed...
The optimal economic exploitation of renewable resources has been a subject of great interest in the last few decades. Nevertheless many fish stocks have been damaged in such a way that economical exploitation is jeopardized or even interrupted. Consequently, an increasing number of fisheries are collapsing. Causes that are frequently...
A wide range of fisheries are managed using vessel catch limits combined with different kinds of effort restrictions. This management framework is expected to have desirable consequences for the bioeconomic sustainability of fisheries. When appropriately implemented this approach produces outcomes that are similar to those associated with individual fishing quotas....
Recent results from a vector error correction (VEC) analysis indicate that El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events appear to affect both red snapper landings and effort in the Gulf of Mexico headboat fishery (Carter and Letson 2005). A key finding is that the outcome of policy changes can vary depending on...
Efficient management of natural resources hinges on our ability to monitor and assess the status of the resource stocks as well as the actions and economic performance of the agents utilizing such resources. The sustainability and viability (both in physical and economic terms) of our resource management plans can in...
In this paper we use stock size, harvest quantity and fishing effort, respectively, as strategic variables. We model a two agent (nations) non-cooperative fishery game, where the agents harvest a common fish stock. The planning horizon is infinite. The model is solved successively using one instrument at a time as...
Many international fisheries agreements involve sharing rules. These rules are normally stable rules, not contingent on shifts in the relative distribution or development of the resource. In the latest IPCC report,
the most likely future scenario is an increase in the global mean temperature, and most severely in high
latitudes....
The optimal management of the European hake fishery (southern stock) is analysed. Since
the activity of the fleets has different impacts on marine resource in this fishery, depending
on the selectivity of their gears, the degree of selectivity is included in the analysis.
Likewise the changes in the selectivity of...
The introduction of modern trawl fishing in Norway after the Second World War was intended to be the very platform for the modernisation of the fishing industry. Right up to the end of the seventies, market orientation and the absence of state regulation of fishing were on the agenda. However,...
Tsunami catastrophe has had devastated ten main fishing districts of the country and which account for 72% of the
marine landings. The tsunami affected areas are very important for commercial tuna fisheries and fish landings
(except shrimp aquaculture), fleet operations and livelihood of fishermen. The purpose of this study was...
There is much talk on recycling organic effluents, closing nutrient cycles, maximising energetic efficiency, and maintaining
equilibriums between humans and nature, etc., even for lakes and estuaries. Aquatic systems provide us (humans)
the service of recycling decomposable organics and deliver fish at the same time, notably, as long as the...
On 26th December 2004, colossal waves known as tsunami engulfed the coastal nations around the Indian
Ocean. The disaster brought physical, psychological and emotional suffering beyond measure to many
communities. It resulted in immense devastation of many coastal vegetations and marine ecosystems. The
fisheries in the coastal villages in Sri...
This paper studies the consequences of creating a marine protected area (MPA) on a recreational non-extractive use of the ecosystem (scuba diving), and draws a parallel with the impact of MPAs on
commercial fishing. The first part of the paper presents some preliminary results of a field survey of scuba...
Marine habitats and the fisheries they support may be modified through the use of human-made physical structures placed in the sea. These structures ('artificial reefs') serve a variety of functions, ranging from the traditional practice of food production to newer applications which include mariculture, tourism and resource conservation. The presentation...
This paper is drawn from a project report that was sponsored by the United Nations through the Benguela Current Large Marine Ecosystem Programme. We analyze the economics of fishery management in the Benguela Current Large Marine Ecosystem (BCLME), reviewing the case for and against regional co-operation in managing the BCLME....
The marine fisheries sector in India is currently going through a phase of socio-economic cum ecological turbulence.
The rate of growth in marine fisheries production, as evidenced by recent studies, is plateauing, if not, declining.
The need for initiating management options that promote sustainable resource utilization and stable livelihood
security...
The present article describes the changes that took place, in terms of efficiency and distributional issues, within
Chile’s central-southern pelagic fishery industry when the administrative regime evolved from controlling the
fishing effort to assigning individual fishing quotas. These changes are described through a set of indicators that
reveal variations in...
Early in 2002, members of two Producer Organisations (POs), the North Sea Fishermen’s
Organisation in Britain, and the Dutch Cooperative Producentenorganisatie Oost Nederland,
realised that their quotas of plaice and sole were insufficient to last until the end of the quota
period. Vessels have in the order of 70-80% of...
Highly migratory fish stocks in the Western and Central Pacific Ocean are an important source of income
for those Pacific island nations through whose economic zones the stocks pass, and for distant water
fishing nations that target the stocks. Although the tropical stocks have been regarded in the past as...
This paper explores the possibility of using marine reserves to protect stocks subject to bycatch problems. The importance of migration rates and growth rates of both target and bycatch species and costs are analyzed. Pure open access equilibrium harvest of target species and stock level of bycatch species are compared...
The field of marine resources management is very broad and diverse. It is also very dynamic as new and
exciting research is being produced in emerging fields such as aquaculture and integrated management.
This research proposes to evaluate the trends in research pertaining to the many fields within marine
resources...
Theorists and modelers have made significant progress in defining ecological and economic parameters
for measuring the 'costs' of fisheries. The social dimensions of such universal exercises, however, have
barely been worked upon. This is a serious omission. In the context of the EC-funded ECOST
programme, a group of social scientists...
This paper identifies factors of non-compliance for the Heard Island and McDonald Island (HIMI)
Fishery of Australia and analyses these factors under the theoretical framework of non-compliance that
exists in fisheries economics literature. It is found that identified factors were consistent with the
theoretical construct. The paper also examines various...
This paper discusses the development of a Marine Sector Strategy for Qeshm Island for the Qeshm Free
Area Authority (QFA). Qeshm Island is an Iranian island, a Free Trade Zone near the entrance of the
Persian Gulf in the Straits of Hormuz. The long-term strategy of QFA is to develop...
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...
This paper is based on work that the authors have carried out on EU financed projects in the South Western Indian
Ocean (SWIO) in collaboration with the Indian Ocean Tuna Commission and the Indian Ocean Commission (IOC)¹ on a range of fisheries management issue including, stock assessment, tagging and monitoring,...
Game-theoretic fisheries models typically consider cases where some n countries harvest a common fish
stock x. For this common resource they attempt to achieve an agreement that would be beneficial to all
countries. The present paper considers cases where the countries may be involved in several coexisting
agreements. We identify...
Studies on compliance with fishing regulations have looked at fishery crimes for which the offender faces a one-period
decision problem of maximizing an expected utility. Moreover, the returns to the crimes are uncertain
because the offender may lose them if caught. This paper extends these models by considering a fishery...
Vietnam’s marine fisheries are in need of knowledge-based management. This necessitates the establishment of
reliable indicators, which in turn entails a good data collecting and processing system. To bridge the gap between
specific requirements for fisheries policy development and the limited resources available, we have conducted a
study on costs...