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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...