Seminars

January, Tuesday 14th 2025

Martin Quaas (Université de Leipzig) will present “Fisheries Management from a Fisherman’s perspective: An Economic Theory”.

Abstract:

The economics of overfishing has been largely understood since long, and proposals for economically more efficient management have been made. In particular, strong user rights in fisheries have been identified as a way towards greatly increasing efficiency and biological sustainability of fisheries. Yet, the uptake of catch shares as the primary form of rights-based fishery management has been limited and slowing down in recent years and, strikingly, the problem of overfishing has not been going down in the past decades. In this paper we develop a theory to analyze fisheries management from a fisherman’s perspective. With strong user rights, and efficiently managed stocks, fishermen receive resource rent and producer surplus. Without strong user rights, they only receive producer surplus. We study the preferred quota management from the fisherman’s perspective and find that it is strictly higher than the more efficient, rent-maximizing management. We further compare the welfare that a fisherman derives from (i) an efficiently managed fishery and (ii) a fishery under (regulated) open access. As overall efficiency is higher in the fishery with strong user rights, in principle it could Pareto-dominate the open-access fishery. In practice, however, the fisherman may be better off in the fishery under (regulated) open access. We find that even full grandfathering of resource-use rights does not guarantee a strict Pareto improvement, as some resource users will leave the sector.