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

on the optimal rate of exploitation becomes ambiguous. The paper examines the
impact of the discount rate with and without stock-dependent harvesting costs.
This leads on to the question o how the risk of extinction under free access
depends on the sensitivity of unit harvesting costs, or catch per unit of
effort, to the size of the exploited stock.
Finally, stochastic fishery models are briefly considered. The main
purpose of this part of the paper is to demonstrate that deterministic fishery
models may give poor guidance for managing the stochastic fisheries of the
real world, even if risk neutrality and constant prices are assumed. To
demonstrate this as clearly as possible, the unit cost of harvesting is
assumed to be constant, implying that the optimal rate of exploitation is
constant in a deterministic model. First, we consider the simple case of
time-invariant stochastic catch quotas (no population dynamics), and
demonstrate how optimal catch capacity depends on the cost of investing in the
necessary equipment. Then we consider population dynamics, where expected
future catch quotas depend on how much is being taken presently. Optimal
catch capacity depends on the cost of investment in this case as well, but the
derivation of optimal harvesting and investment policies becomes more
complicated.
Hannesson, R. (1988). "Fixed or Variable Catch Quotas? The Importance
of Population Dynamics and Stock Dependent Costs." Marine
Resource Economics, 5(4):415-432.
This article considers two questions concerning fluctuations in fish
stocks and catches: are they possible beneficial and would fishery managers
opt for a strategy that enhances stock or catch quota variability or both?
For this analysis, three models are followed: in the first, variations in
stock abundance are stochastic with no population dynamics; in the second, the
stock in a certain time period depends on a stochastic recruitment to the
stock and survivors from the previous time period; and the third is a year
class model that has more complicated population dynamics but is more
realistic. The article implicitly assumes that property rights exist by using
profit maximizing mathematical techniques.
Hannesson, Rognvaldur (1993). "Enclosure of the Commons: Two
Paradoxes." Presented at the International Conference on
Fisheries Economics, Os, Norway, May 26-28.
de Meza and Gould (1992) show that the rent from enclosing a free access
resource may, at the wage rate prior to enclosure, be positive while the
social benefit is negative. Hence there may be an incentive to privatize a
common resource even when this is not warranted for reasons of efficiency.
Books and Heijdra (1990) have criticized Buchanan (1980) for a similar
approach when demonstrating that the potential benefits of enclosing the
commons may be dissipated through rent seeking. In this paper we show that de
Meza and Gould's conclusion that the rent from enclosure will be higher than
the social benefit at the free access wage rate still holds when there is a
real cost of the enclosure and diminishing returns in both sectors of the
economy. It may, however, happen that the resource rent after enclosure is
negative while the social benefit of enclosure is positive. Hence we might
end up in the curious situation that neither free access nor enclosure is an
equilibrium.
Hannesson, Rognvaldur (1993). "Fishing Capacity and Harvest Rules."
Marine Resource Economics, 8(2):133-143.
In this note we consider the choice of optimum fishing capacity for fish
stocks that vary at random. In models with stochastic variations of fish
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