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...
Days at sea restrictions were introduced in 2003 as part of the cod recovery strategy in the North Sea. The impact on the profitability of the fleet of the effort controls, however, is not immediately discernable, as the fishery was also subject to changes in costs, prices and stock conditions....
Generalised linear estimation and multi-layer perception neural network modelling techniques were applied to the Scottish trawler fleet data in order to estimate which inputs have the greatest impact on boat profits and output. Both produced comparable estimates that revealed inelastic and non-linear response to vessel power and length, negative response...
The world’s output of farmed fish has grown steadily over the past two decades or so. Most
notably in the UK, since the mid 1980’s, a rapid increase in farmed salmon production has taken
place. Given that many of the world’s oceans are overfished, many see aquaculture as a method...
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...
Spatial bio-economic models are becoming increasingly important in the attempt to offer ever more dependable advice to fisheries managers. The main reason for this is the escalating interest in marine protected areas and more precisely fishing exclusion zones. As such the key issue of fishing effort dynamics needs to be...
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...
This study investigates the economic impact to fisheries and associated sectors if wild fisheries continue operating to
2030 without considering the effects of climate change. Estimates of climate change impacts in Australian fisheries
and their associated probability distributions were derived from the literature and expert consultations. An Input-
Output model...
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,...
The concept of compensatory mitigation is well established as an approach to environmental management. In the past, mitigation programs have been used to conserve wetlands affected by development, and is proposed as a cost-effective approach to offsetting greenhouse gas emissions through reforestation programs. The concept may be equally applicable to...
A concern for the consequences of bycatch and discards in fisheries has led to the implementation of
new policies and fisheries management plans aimed at their reduction in many fisheries around the
world. Such plans have been developed for the Australian Commonwealth fisheries (the most recent
bycatch action plan extends...
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...
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...
Capacity reduction programs in the form of buybacks or decommissioning programs have had relatively widespread application in fisheries in the US, Europe and Australia. A common criticism of such programs is that they remove the least efficient vessels first, resulting in an increase in average efficiency of the remaining fleet....
Considerable attention has been applied to the development of models explaining how fish stocks change over space
and time, from relatively simple stock-recruitment relationships to ecosystem models with a complex food web
structure. However, in many case studies fishing effort is assumed to be exogenous and even in dynamic models...
Under the IIFET 2018 Special Session “Tools for Stock Assessment, Economic Fishery Analysis, and Risk Assessment for Sustainable Management Strategies of Data Poor Stocks in Mixed, Small Scale and Indigenous Fisheries” a number of stakeholder presentations addressed the current status, challenges, needs and future perspectives for implementation of management and...
Vietnam is in the club of countries gifted with the long coastal line, and strong in marine features accordingly. Fishing operations are artisan characteristic and the management method is primarily open – access. Since the past few years, the yellow fin tuna long- lining fishery has become one sub-sector experiencing...
The purpose of this study is aimed at developing a simple bioeconomic model of the Namibian rock lobster fishery, with the main objective being to incorporate economics into fisheries management in order to estimate the potential economic benefits that could accrue to the fishery given efficient management. The complex nature...
The increasing demand for shark fins in Asia and the shark s life history pattern of slow growth, late maturity, and
few offspring, have generated concerns regarding the sustainability of shark resources. Despite this concern, little effort has
been spent on understanding the markets for shark fin products and the...
In this paper, the estimate of the productive efficiency for some Italian fleet segments is proposed. The estimate is based on a Stochastic Frontier Production (SFP) function and a Data Envelopment Analysis frontier (DEA) using micro data of fishing vessels. The essential random nature of the fishing processes under consideration...
Entrepreneurial New Zealand harvesters created a viable diving fishery for King Clams, Panopea zelandica, in the 1970's
contributing to the development of allocation rights to harvest. Once under the quota management system (QMS), however,
allocations for allowable catch do not reflect the harvest potential for this fishery. Expectations for quota...
When attempting to mitigate the environmental impacts of a fishery there are typically multiple criteria
against which the performance of any measures can be assessed. If the gains are non-commercial (i.e.
non-market) in nature, formally determining how well measures perform becomes more difficult. This study applies the analytic hierarchy process...
In this paper we analyse different econometric procedures of technical efficiency to estimate fishing capacity. These procedures are then applied to the purse seine fishery located in the Gulf of Cádiz. The target species of this fishery has changed quite a lot over the past few years. It used to...
Most fish stocks worldwide are not optimally exploited and are therefore are producing less in biologic and economic terms that what it could be obtained. MSY objective for all the stocks by 2015 is put forward by several countries as management target to be achieved, while other countries such as...
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....
The incorporation of fisheries commodities into the International Food Policy Research Institute’s (IFPRI) International Model for Policy Analysis of Agricultural Commodities and Trade (IMPACT) model suggests that demand for fisheries products will rise faster than supply over the next two decades, and that fishery commodity prices will rise relative to...
Economic performance indicators are needed in order to improve fisheries policy in Vietnam. The
research project “Revenues and Costs of Fishing Vessels in the Nha Trang Area” has been established to
meet these needs. A questionnaire about technical characteristics and economic data of vessel and gear
in use in the...
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...
In this paper a data envelopment model is presented to evaluate short term investment decisions in the Dutch beam trawl and demersal fleet. We investigated how short run profit drives investment decisions and how a data envelopment analysis can be used to show what the optimal level of capital use...
The optimal harvesting time in a fish farm is analyzed in the paper. Fish population is assumed to be heterogeneous with respect to weight, so a distributed parameter dynamic model is considered. Theoretical and numerical results are obtained and compared with the ones concerning homogeneous fish cultures only. The results...
The decision to enter or exit a fishery can be expected to depend on the anticipated profitability of operating in
this fishery, as a function of observed vessel performances in previous years. For a vessel exiting a fishery,
there may be several reasons including decommissioning, selling or operating elsewhere. Entry...
Reef fish traded alive for table food is a high value-to-volume fishery, with demand centred in luxury markets in Hong Kong and southern mainland China. Approximately twenty countries in the Asia-Pacific region supply these markets. A number of economic, environmental and social issues have arisen from the trade; including the...
Yearly revisions of Total Allowable Catch under EU policies for the management of North Sea fisheries come at
high management costs and capital adjustment costs. It is unclear whether current EU fisheries policy strikes the
right balance between the need to regularly adjust fish quota to new information on one...
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...
This paper analyzes the behavior of fishing households under individual transferable quotas (ITQ) system based on Singh, Squire and Strauss household model. ITQ system is sought to be the optimal fishery management regime in terms of economic efficiency. However, preceding theoretical analyses only considered implementing ITQ to a well established...
The harvest technology of several multispecies fisheries has been explained in the recent literature using dual-based models. These studies are useful for explaining rent dissipation, estimating input and output elasticities, as well as describing other aspects of fisherman behavior. Most of these analyses have assumed that inputs are fixed at...
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...
This paper provides a Total Allowable Catch (TAC) assessment model for a single gear, multi-species fishery in South Korea. To estimate appropriate Allowable Biological Catch (ABC) of mackerel and jack mackerel caught by the large purse seine fleet in the territorial waters of South Korea, the model uses an extended...
In this paper, a new test for causality in demand on markets supplied by both farmed and captured fish is
presented. This method is applied on markets for trout and potential substitutes imported to Germany, to
identify market delineation and causality in demand. It is found that markets for small...
This paper proposes a two-stage method to estimate a generalized Gordon-Schaefer model,
using heterogeneous fishing data in the logbook. A Cobb-Douglas production function is consistently
estimated in the first stage by means of the ‘within period estimator’. A stock index
is constructed and used to estimate the logistic growth model...
Fishing overcapacity has lead to unsustainable harvesting and rent dissipation in global fisheries. Only government intervention of some kind can lead to a reduction in capacity. If efficiency is the primary objective for the regulator, then the least efficient vessels should be decommissioned. Here we analyze the Swedish fishery using...
Individual transferable quotas (ITQs) have been used in several countries worldwide to regulate access to
marine fisheries. While ITQs can improve the economic efficiency of fisheries, in practice they are not a
panacea and distribution and equity issues have been raised in many cases. To overcome those issues,
ITQ systems...
In this paper, we study recovering processes for fisheries facing crisis or over-exploitation of a marine renewable
resource. We examine how to restore resource stocks and modify the economic characteristics of the fleet in order to
put on a sustainable exploitation system, near of some maximal standard as the Maximum...
A key issue in fisheries restoration is the speed at which recovery can occur, while still meeting the
economic and social constraints which managers must deal with. This paper uses the viable control approach to examine fisheries restoration and study the tradeoffs involved with the selection of recovery strategies. We...
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...
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...
This paper deals with the sustainable management of a renewable resource
based on individual and transferable quotas (ITQs) when agents differ in terms of
harvesting costs or catchability. In a dynamic bio-economic model, we determine
the conditions under which the manager of an ITQ system can achieve sustainability
objectives which...
There are many fishing landing areas in southern Iran, distributed all along the northern Persian
Gulf. Despite increasing effort, the total catch has fluctuated in recent years. Iran is facing with
over capacity of vessels and too many fishers, yet simultaneously political, social and
economical pressures exist for expansion of...
Nile tilapia has been cultivated in intensive systems in Yucatan, Mexico, during the first years of this century. Nevertheless, its adoption faces technical (related to the use of commercial feed) and marketing problems (fixed price of $2.14/Kg), which are analyzed in this paper. To do this, a bioeconomic model of...
This paper re-examines the evidence of causality and price transmission between fish prices of main species landed into Piraeus (Greece) and Cornwall (UK). To complete the analysis of cointegration and causality, we use the data of Floros and Failler (2004) and Avdelas (2004). Our paper uses the Bivariate Generalised Autoregressive...
The EU FP 7 project ‘SOCIOEC’ started in March 2012 and this paper gives an overview on the main research questions and first results.
SOCIOEC is an interdisciplinary project bringing together scientists from several fisheries sciences with industry partners and other key stakeholders to work on solutions for future fisheries...
The fish market in Finland has changed dramatically since the removal of trade barriers to the importation of fresh salmon in 1993. Imported salmon has rapidly captured markets from domestically produced salmon trout. Another clear trend has been increased concentration at the wholesale and retail level, which in turn has...
Tilapia exports to the US have been claimed to double in the last three years following the two bans on
Vietnamese catfish imports in November 2001 and June 2003. The aim of these bans was to restrict
imports from the major exporter of Catfish (Vietnam) reducing competition for US catfish...
This paper is a study of the production technology and relative efficiency of vessels harvesting tiger prawns in the northern prawn fishery (NPF), one of Australia’s largest and most lucrative fishing areas. It is based on a unbalanced panel data set of 228 observations among thirty-seven vessels for the years...
This paper proposes a formal analysis of the discarding issue including the sorting labour costs. Empirical evidences from an application to the Nephrops fishery in the Bay of Biscay show that sorting is an important time consuming activity on board and a factor of discarding. However existing literature does not...
Key decision variables in aquaculture management are stocking level, feeding schedule, temperature
control and batch length. In many management problems with an infinite planning horizon, the aim is to
find the batch length which results in maximum return if the same batch length applies to all future
batches. This may...
Fisher behavior can be divided into choices made in the short term (i.e. tactics) and choices made in the long-mid term (i.e. strategies). Random utility modeling (RUM) is well suited for the empirical analysis of these issues. In this paper, RUM is applied to a number of EU fisheries in...
BEMMFISH is conceptualised as a bio-economic model for non-industrial/artisanal fisheries, allowing for multi-species dynamics and multi-fleet dynamics, where the control variable is effort (not the catch). The aim of this paper is to give an overview of the simulation part of the BEMMFISH model and to focus on the most...
Management of individual species in a multi-species fishery poses a number of challenges for fishery management systems, including the problem of managing fish bycatch. Fish bycatch is sometimes identified as a particular problem associated with management systems based on individual transferable quotas (ITQs) but this has not always proven to...
Wholesale demand systems for live reef food fish in Hong Kong are analysed using the Linear Approximate Almost Ideal Demand System (LA/AIDS). Results suggest that price elasticities of demand are inelastic, with relatively high-valued species exhibiting greater elasticity than relatively low-valued species. Cross price elasticities are negative suggesting that different...
Most fishermen are faced with several options in both long and short term planning of their activity. In this paper we study fishers short term decisions when different seasonal fishery options are available. This involves choices of spatial and temporal allocation of effort as well as use of varying fishing...
This study explores the optimal harvesting time in a size-heterogeneous population dynamics. The model includes the effect of population density in both the mortality rate and individual growth. An application to specific conditions of shrimp culture in Mexico is presented. The optimal harvesting rule is numerically found for different economic...
Chronic overcapacity has been identified as a major cause of the overfishing of Europe’s fish stocks and
the poor economic performance of the European fishing fleets. Mechanisms are needed to ensure that the
capacity of European fishing fleets remain proportionate to available fish stocks. To that end, the
European Commission...
Tilapia is one of the fastest growing aquaculture species in the world. It is produced and consumed in all continents and in more countries than most other species, making the market more heterogeneous than for other successful aquaculture species such as salmon and shrimp. This paper investigates the degree of...
Seafood consumption has been traditionally very important in Spain (about 36.5 kg per capita
consumed in 2003). Hake (merluza) is the main fish species consumed in quantity and value
terms in Spain. But commercialised as hake can be found several fish species and presentations.
When many papers focus on product...
The use of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) has been proposed as a possible tool to enable the measurement of fishing capacity worldwide. In fisheries the DEA approach has been limited to measuring physical capacity, where capacity is defined as the maximum amount of output that can be produced per unit...
This paper compares two methods for collecting data concerning professional fishing fleets economic performance : use of preexisting bookkeeping databases and ad hoc field surveys of fishers. Each method has its pros and cons and, for practical reasons, it may be necessary to make use of both. Such a feature...
Lobster (Homarus americanus) ranks first in Canada’s fisheries, but Quebec lobster represents only 6% of eastern Canada landings. During the peak of the fishing season in Quebec as elsewhere, supply is at its maximum and price is the lowest. For this reason, there has been considerable interest in Quebec in...
Management of the Danish protein fisheries in the North Sea has during recent years become increasingly politicised, as various stakeholder groups are seeking influence on the decision-making process. In relation to management of the sand eel and Norway pout fisheries, two different issues are debated. In the sand eel fishery,...
Fisheries worldwide continue to suffer from the negative consequences of open access. In 1986, New Zealand responded by establishing an individual transferable quota (ITQ) system that by 1998 included 33 species and more than 150 markets for fishing quotas. We assess these markets in terms of trends in market activity,...
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...
The Spanish market is the most important market for hake and hake has been for many years the demersal fish most captured in Spain. To the traditional product differentiation due to size, gear and presentation form (fresh, frozen and frozen fillets), a new differentiation can be performed regarding the hake...
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...
In multispecies fisheries managed with individual fishery quotas (IFQs), fishers targeting certain species often have
insufficient quota to cover other jointly caught species. New Zealand employs a unique dual price-quantity system to
address this problem. In lieu of acquiring quota, fishers can opt to pay a fee per unit of...
Catch share systems are being encouraged and considered in a variety of United States (U.S.) fisheries. Scientists, policy makers, and stakeholders (including fishermen and non-governmental environmental organizations) have different views about potential social and economic impacts and outcomes of these output- oriented systems. Thus identifying and evaluating impacts over time...