annotated bibliography of fisheries economics literature - Office of ...

the Limited Access Workshop, Seattle, Washington, November 1-3.
National Marine Fisheries Service, Northeast Fisheries Science
Center, Woods Hole, MA, October.
The paper discusses whether ITQs are a resource right or a usufructuary
or harvest right. As a harvest right, the ITQ holder does not have the
ability to set TAC and may still have incentives to act inefficiently;
highgrading of catch. ITQ may, however, be a step toward resource rights
since New Zealand ITQ holders have appropriated management rights from the
government by agreeing to harvest less than the TAC, enforce rules, and fund
research in the orange roughy and abalone fisheries.
Edwards, Steven F. (1994). Managing Marine Fisheries by Controlled Access:
What Alternatives are Available? In Karyn L. Gimbel (ed.) Limiting
Access to Marine Fisheries: Keeping the Focus on Conservation, Center
for Marine Conservation and the World Wildlife Fund, Washington, D.C.
Alternatives to control (or limit) access to marine fish resources are
classified on the basis of who owns the legal right of exclusion. Throughout
the world, participation in some marine fisheries is controlled by the state
through allocation of usufructuary rights of access or harvest. License
limitation, individual transferable quotas, and area licensing are forms of
usufructuary rights controlled by state regulatory regimes.
Unappreciated, though, are many instances of participation being
controlled by collectives of individual harvesters. In collective choice
regimes, commercial fishermen and others with interests in a marine fish
resource contract access as well as usufructuary rights.
Finally, private property regimes also control access to marine fish
resources. In this alternative, participation is authorized by a single,
private entity. The entity could be a commercial fishing or fish processing
corporation, a charter fishing enterprise, or conceivably, a conservation
organization, depending on the initial allocation of rights and the
opportunity to market the rights.
In addition to controlling access, the right to exclude people from a
fish resource strongly favors both conservation and economic efficiency,
especially when exclusion is coupled with the rights of management and market
transfer and when rights are backed by the state. Judging from theory and
case studies, usufructuary rights alone have yielded limited conservation and
economic benefits from use of fish and other natural resources under a state
regulatory regime. However, usufructuary rights are widely believed to be
superior to open access, and they are a necessary phase in the evolution of
potentially better collective choice or private property regimes.
Edwards, Steven F. (1994). "Ownership of Renewable Ocean Resources."
Marine Resource Economics, 9(3):253-273.
Much of the recent fisheries economics literature promotes usufructuary
rights policies to lessen the dissipation of resource rents. However, this
literature does not count institutional inefficiencies which result from rent
seeking and the principal agent problem when a centralized government controls
access to renewable ocean resources. As a result, the efficiency of
usufructuary rights programs, including ITQs, throughout the economy could be
exaggerated. From a dynamic standpoint, though, usufructuary rights policies
remain an important avenue for residual claimants to contract for less
attenuated institutions of common or private property rights. These
conclusions are drawn from a survey of the property rights and public choice
literatures.
Edwards, Steven F. (1998). "Rent-Seeking in the U.S. Atlantic Sea
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