Fishing Productivity and Its Relation to Management Regimes
Although both economic and biological performance have long been important
focal points in fisheries economics, traditional productivity measurement has
historically played an ancillary role. In the past two decades, however, it has
been increasingly recognized that modeling and measuring production processes in
fisheries is a key to understanding, and ultimately correcting, imbalances
resulting from market failures and biological constraints. Production models
allow one to track standard
measures of economic performance and to analyze how such measures change in
response to regulatory and biological variations. In this paper we add to the
currently limited literature on productivity in fisheries, by estimating
productivity and its components for the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands pollock
fishery. In particular, we analyze changes in productivity that occurred for
catcher-processors after introduction of cooperatives through the American
Fisheries Act. We also incorporate measures of discarded bycatch in our model so
that productivity measures embody externalities generated by pollock harvesting
operations. Our approach is less restrictive than the existing fishery
productivity studies in that we relax assumptions regarding constant returns to
scale, marginal cost pricing, Hicks-neutrality, and homothetic separability.
This work is being conducted jointly with Catherine Morrison Paul at the
University of California, Davis. For more information or to comment on this
project, contact ron.felthoven@noaa.gov
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