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 paper analyzes the relative performance of two market-based fisheries management instruments in the presence of a stochastic stock-recruitment relation. Regulators are forced to choose either a fee per fish landed or a quota on the total fish harvest at a time when they are uncertain what will be...
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...
This paper is a case study of the interrelationship between public policy and species decline in the oyster industry of Pamlico Sound, North Carolina, in the late 19th century, with some attention paid to the first decade of the 20th century. It examines the nature of the many regulatory shifts...
A logical analysis of the common fisheries models used in stock assessment has shown that they produce specific predictions with the logical form of existential statements, fail Karl Popper’s falsifiability criterion, and so cannot be falsified or tested by the empirical evidence. By contrast, the theoretical models of fisheries economics...
Fishing is one of the most intensively regulated industries in the U.S. economy. Theoretically, regulating an industry
means subjecting it to the rule of law: treating those with an interest in the resource fairly while preserving the public interest
in public order, economic efficiency, and conservation. There are, however, two...
For more than a century, politicians, newspaper editors, tate and federal fisheries managers, and their various constituencies with an interest in salmon have complained,lobbied and petitioned, sought legislative relief, and studied to near extinction the declining runs of the Pacific Northwest’s anadromous fish runs. All to no avail, of course....
Lake Chad is a vitally important wetland in the semi-arid Sahel corridor. It provides the basis of many thousands of livelihoods which depend on its seasonal fluctuations to renew fish stocks, farmland and rangeland. This paper describes how the institutions which govern access to fishing rights has evolved on the...
The Market Quota System (MQS) is a free market style public resource tool. It can be applied to any public resource, such as fisheries, forestry, minerals, and even such things as airport runway scheduling slots, or taxi licenses etc. Any time that a public resource is sought after by private...
Fisheries management as we know it today is in a perpetual state of crisis because it is fatally flawed. Fisheries management will increasingly fail to prevent species decline, and even exacerbate those declines, unless it adopts new institutional priorities and methodologies based not on the prevalent “Industrial Model,” which is...