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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Weitzman's paper is useful because it provides the fisheries economics profession with a reason to re-examine certain elements of the currently accepted fisheries management theory. As a result, this contribution may lead to a more solid theoretical foundation for fisheries management. This, of course, is the way any science is...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 considers the costs of fisheries management. It starts by reviewing the costs of fisheries management in Iceland, Newfoundland and Norway. The outcome of this study, as well as information from other countries, indicates that fisheries management costs are generally quite substantial relative to the value of landed catch....
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
This paper reports on a study of Icelandic government expenditures on fisheries and fisheries management during the period from 1990 to 1996. This study is a part of a joint Canadian, Icelandic and Norwegian project attempting to estimate consistently government expenditures on fisheries and fisheries management in these three countries...
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...
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...
In a 2009 paper in Land Economics, Roy, Arnason and Schrank used a newly developed methodology based on cointegration analysis to establish and measure the role of the fishing industry as an economic base industry (and the only such base industry) for the Canadian province of Newfoundland over the period...
We estimated the economic rent obtained currently (that is, in 2002) in the Namibian hake fishery and the rent that might potentially be obtainable if the fishery were managed optimally in the sense of economics. We first reviewed previous economic and biological studies. We then used the theory and model...
This collection houses the proceedings of the 20th biennial conference of the International Institute of Fisheries Economics & Trade (IIFET), entitled Managing a Changing Environment. The conference took place at Auditorio Mar de Vigo in Vigo, Galicia, Spain, from 18-22 July 2022. Conference organizers were M. Dolores Garza-Gil (University of...
The governance of fish resources that migrate between or straddle different national EEZs is always complicated and often contentious. In the Western and Central Pacific Ocean (WCPO) valuable tuna stocks are found in significant quantities in more than 12 national Exclusive Economic Zones as well as extensive high seas areas...
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.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to acknowledge the contributions of RagnarArnason and Judith Swan (co
Over the past several years we have been developing Fishery Performance Indicators (FPIs) to measure the degree of success fisheries systems have in achieving environmental, economic and community outcomes. We have also developed indicators of key input factors. Among the input factors we have explicitly developed indicators for women’s participation and leadership...
An ITQ scheme has been shown to create a quota induced incentive for discarding of fish in excess of what is socially optimal. This finding is corroborated by empirical evidence in several ITQ managed fisheries. The incentive for discarding, over and above those expected in an unmanaged or input controlled...
This historical survey sweeps across a thousand years, divided into five very unequal stages. Over most of the stages property in tide-water fisheries was lost. Fishers lost control of the fishstock and of the markets they served. Governments responded with fishing regulations, which have served as a basis for regaining...
This paper discusses the use of options as a tool to retrieve valuable information on the value and level of risk associated with owning a share in a stock of renewable resource. The objective is to show how theory on options trading can be used to obtain information on the...
During 1986-2006, fisheries in Tonkin Gulf had made rapid development. Total engine power increased 11.6 times while total catch only increased 2.9 times. Big increase in number of fishing boats has resulted to the overexploitation in near shore waters since 1995 and this situation has been spread out all over...
The governance of fish resources that migrate between or straddle different national EEZs is always complicated and often contentious. In the Western and Central Pacific Ocean (WCPO) valuable tuna stocks are found in significant quantities in more than 12 national Exclusive Economic Zones as well as extensive high seas areas...
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WCPO tuna fishery
Thank you
Acknowledgements
•RagnarArnason and Judith Swan
•PNA Office (Sangaa
In “Landing fees vs. harvest quotas with
uncertain fish stocks”, Martin Weitzman maintains that
the conventional view among both fisheries economists
and fisheries managers is that “prices” are inferior to
“quantities” as instruments for regulating the fishing
industry. Weitzman takes the opposite position,
appealing to two well-established ideas in economics:...
The Conference Program for IIFET, held July 10-14 in Corvallis, Oregon. Program lists the sessions by date and time and includes the session titles, speakers and paper titles.
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...
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...
This paper is designed to “set the stage” for the Special Session on Game Theory and Fisheries. It traces the origins of the application of game theory to fisheries economics, noting that, for the first quarter of a century after the publication of H. Scott Gordon’s 1954 seminal article, the...
Individual Transferable Quota systems (ITQ's) were implemented in the Icelandic groundfish fisheries in 1984, or twenty years ago. The system was not a 'pure' ITQ system from the beginning, notably with different regulations for different fleet segments and with several changes along the way. The current system has mostly been...
A debate is emerging over the extent to which privatization of fishery resources – private ownership and resource management without significant state oversight- is practical and socially desirable. What we term the “optimists” maintain that there are no effective limits to privatization and that the decades old fear that privatization...
The diplomatic corps of Iceland has used much of its time during the third quarter of the 20. century to convince other nations that Icelanders should control and utilise the resources of the waters within 12, then 50 and finally 200 nautical miles around the island. Icelandic politicians have used...