This paper presents a bioeconomic model for managing commercially valuable marine invasive species. The model, using Norway's red king crab (RKC) fisheries as a case study, emphasizes the balance between ecological control and economic benefits. It integrates spatial management, enforcement, the effects of harvesting subsidies in ecological protection zones, and illegal fishing. Model analysis indicates that Norway's current spatial management of RKC, which separates quota-regulated area from removal area, may overestimate stock and quotas. This overestimation may result from a failure to fully account for the side effects of subsidies and noncompliance. Our study reveals that this type of spatially contrasting management regime can create incentives for noncompliance, highlighting the need for careful policy design in spatial management for commercially valuable invasive species. Ultimately, this contribution is both timely and illustrative of management dilemmas increasingly encountered with other invasive species where control and commercial use coexist.
The North Atlantic right whale is one of the most endangered large whale species in the world. In addition to efforts aimed at improving understanding of right whale conservation, seafood consumers could play a role by demanding fishing practices that reduce the risk of right whale entanglement and extinction. Using data from a choice experiment, we estimated US consumers' valuation for lobster harvested using ropeless technology. We also examined which types of information are effective in nudging consumers to bear the cost of novel fishing technology to reduce the risks of entanglement and extinction. The results indicate that US consumers are willing to pay a premium for lobster harvested using ropeless gear, and their valuation differs by the information they receive. This research provides insights for industry stakeholders about US consumers' attitudes toward ropeless fishing for right whale conservation and suggests communication strategies to encourage consumer support for the technology.
The Northeast Atlantic is home to three large pelagic stocks-mackerel, herring, and blue whiting-which combined sustain one of the largest pelagic fisheries in the world. All three stocks undertake extensive seasonal migrations across the Northeast Atlantic, passing through different exclusive economic zones as well as international waters. As such they constitute what is referred to as straddling stocks, which according to the UN Fish Stocks Agreement, are to be managed by regional fisheries management organizations. Over time, it has proved challenging to establish and retain international cooperation in these fisheries, and cooperative agreements that have been reached have frequently broken down. In fact, none of the fisheries is currently cooperatively managed. The purpose of this article is to investigate the reasons for this lack of stability in cooperative management of these fisheries. The analysis is founded on game theory, and the focus is on arrangements that may increase the likelihood of achieving stable cooperation.
Climate-driven shifts in fish stocks, featuring many species across management boundaries, challenge fisheries sustainability. We examine the risk of regional stock extinction due to loss-driven overharvest in the face of climate change. We find critical thresholds for stock levels that, if crossed, can lead to depletion of fish resources within exclusive economic zones. We explore the sensitivity of the threshold to both biological and economic factors, emphasizing the overfishing incentives induced by climate-driven stock shifts. We further investigate the role of direct financial transfer (side payments) as a potential strategy to support conservation efforts under climate change. Loss-induced overfishing poses a substantial threat to global fisheries, especially in the tropical regions. Our findings underline the urgent need for adaptive management strategies to mitigate these risks.
The US seafood market has fundamentally changed during the last three decades. Stable landings and increasing demand have led to a rapid increase in imports-79% of domestic seafood consumption is estimated to come from imports. Despite several policies supporting vulnerable coastal communities, little attention has been given to the impact of imports on prices obtained by domestic producers. Here we investigate the impact of imports on domestic prices for shrimp, a fishery that in the 1980s was the most valuable in the US, but that has seen real landed values decline by one-half since then. Using cointegration analysis, we show that domestic prices closely track those of "shell-on frozen" imports, indicating that import competition largely drives this trend and that domestic US prices are now set in the global market. A similar market structure is likely to be present for other species facing strong import competition.
Four market-available (in December) fish were presented to students in a master's course: fresh farmed Atlantic salmon, fresh farmed steelhead trout, frozen wild sockeye salmon, and wild king salmon. Tasters were asked to identify their favorite fish; which they thought was most expensive; whether they thought each was fresh; and whether they thought each was wild. When the king salmon was frozen, 79% of tasters preferred the farmed fish, largely because it is fresh. Many tasters erroneously attributed the bright, clean flavors and flaky texture they like to being wild: 39% of tasters thought the fresh steelhead was wild, though it is farmed. Still, the strongly flavored and lean sockeye was preferred by about a quarter of the tasters, despite being frozen. This mismatch between consumers' preferred taste attributes and the production attributes on which they base choices implies an opportunity for aquaculture products to continue to expand their market.
A Poisson pseudo-maximum likelihood with fixed-effects gravity model is employed to assess the trade creation and diversion effects of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) and three ASEAN+1 regional trade agreements (RTAs), four RTAs in total, on Taiwan's frozen tuna exports to the top 20 export destinations for six different types of frozen tuna, spanning the period from 2002 to 2021. Our findings show that the conclusion of the CPTPP, China-ASEAN RTA, and South Korea-ASEAN RTA does not significantly undermine Taiwan's competitive advantage in frozen tuna exports. However, the conclusion of the Japan-ASEAN RTA poses a threat to Taiwan's competitiveness, as evidenced by the slight trade diversion effects observed, suggesting Taiwan's export advantage in frozen tuna (030342-yellowfin tuna and 030344-bigeye tuna) has decreased.
Ocean organizations face how to implement justice through fair, equitable, efficient, legal, and legitimate nonmarket allocations of rights, benefits, costs, or distributive impacts. Such allocations and distributional impacts may also face justifiably compensating for unfair inequality of opportunity while preserving fair inequality through natural rewards. Principles of fair division and theories of justice operationalize distribution rules to deliver pluralist procedural and distributive justice for nonmarket allocations. Distribution rules can incorporate responsibility-sensitive egalitarianism, entitlement, desert, need, poverty alleviation, and multiple principles of equity and fairness. This framework creates a focal point(s) to coordinate different parties' expectations and a balanced negotiated settlement of their conflicting rights, claims, viewpoints, norms, and interests. Social distribution weights, as a feasible redistribution mechanism, implement fair and equitable Pigou-Dalton transfers for equality of outcome or to compensate for inequality of opportunity. Resources as an alternative to welfarism and utilitarianism are provided.
Economists modeling recreation decisions commonly assume that the shadow value of time is a specific proportion of the wage rate. This ignores idiosyncrasies that may arise owing to labor market disequilibrium or idiosyncratic differences in constraints on time and marginal utilities of work and leisure. Economists may account for these sources of heterogeneity by estimating the proportion of the wage rate as a random parameter, that is, a "noisy wage fraction." We apply a noisy wage fraction approach that allows for multiple noisy wage fractions using a latent class modeling framework. This framework also allows us to control for individuals who, from the researcher's perspective, are not influenced by travel costs, which we refer to as "cost insignificant" behavior. We apply this model to Alaska saltwater fishing trip data and find support for the presence of cost insignificance behavior (4% of the sample), but less evidence of multiple noisy wage fractions.
The fishery targeting brown shrimp is one of the most valuable fisheries in the EU and the single most valuable coastal fishery in Germany. However, the strong dependence on few wholesalers, fleet aging, supply chain bottlenecks, the reduction of fishing grounds, escalating fuel prices, and other factors threaten the long-term economic perspective. We estimated German brown shrimp fishers' production function and technical efficiency based on a dataset containing all active ships between 2002 and 2021. We employed a panel stochastic frontier analysis to account for the unobserved heterogeneity within the fishing fleet. The dataset contains 3,997 observations. Results showed that aging reduced production possibilities and that the fishery operated under increasing returns to scale. The average efficiency was 83%. Several determinants of inefficiency explained the found heterogeneity. Among them were vessel technical characteristics, participation in producer organizations, and ownership by the skipper.
This study examines market integration between US Gulf reef fish species under catch share management and imported counterparts, the latter of which constitute approximately 80% of total market supply. Using Johansen cointegration analysis, we assess the extent to which domestic and imported snappers and groupers share a common price determination process. Our findings suggest that the law of one price holds for most species pairs, indicating a high degree of market integration. The results imply that even heterogeneous, species-diverse fisheries such as reef fish are increasingly subject to global market forces. This highlights the potential vulnerability of domestic fishers to import competition, particularly under individual transferable quota management, which has been shown to stabilize supply but may also expose local fisheries to greater external price pressures.
Measurement of fishing vessel capacity and capacity utilization has garnered substantial interest among economists for many years. Most applied studies adopted an output-oriented capacity definition and used data envelopment analysis to estimate capacity. However, other types of capacity models have also been used to estimate fishing capacity. Examples include the non-convex free disposal hull model, the probabilistic order-M model, and the maximal revenue model. This study compares capacity utilization estimates for a group of 125 vessels using six different capacity models and compares differences in capacity utilization and days needed to fish at capacity. Findings show significant differences in both capacity utilization estimates and days needed to achieve maximum capacity. With multiple models available for generating capacity estimates, analysts should be careful to select appropriate models when estimating fishery-level capacity or determining the presence and/or conditions of over- or undercapacity.
The perishability of fresh produce challenges food supply chains, particularly in developing countries where storage and refrigeration facilities are limited and costly. Transforming these products to less perishable forms is common in these countries and offers an ideal example to explore price transmission behaviors that have not been explicitly analyzed in the previous literature. Using fresh and dried fish price data from Sri Lanka, and a nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL) model, our study found that wholesale price increases rapidly reach the retailer, yet the reductions take more time, showing positive price asymmetry in both fish markets. The magnitude of this asymmetry is lower in the more perishable fresh fish market. Unlike dried fish, which can be stored during low-demand periods and sold at higher prices because of its longer shelf life, fresh fish must be sold quickly to avoid deterioration and losses, leading to lower asymmetry.
This paper uses the limited entry (LE) permit portfolio in the previous year to construct an ex-ante measure of diversification at the individual level. We first show that LE permit portfolios in the previous year can effectively be seen as a choice set of the vessel this year. We then show that our diversification measure-the number of types of LE permits in the portfolio in the previous year-is strongly correlated with popular ex-post measures of diversification, but they tend to deviate when an external shock hits the fisheries. Focusing on the US West Coast during 1995-2016, we find that ex-ante more diversified vessels are more likely to participate in the following year, and they exhibit a smaller coefficient of variation in gross revenue. Overall, our measure of diversification is conceptually sound and can be used as an alternative to popular ex-post measures.
We examine the relationship between media news and trading behavior in the salmon market. For this, we create a share price index based on five salmon aquaculture companies trading on the Oslo Stock Exchange. We use the latent Dirichlet allocation algorithm to obtain news topics and a lexicon-based sentiment analysis. We find that topics relating to COVID-19 and sustainability have a significant negative impact on the salmon market, while topics on land-based aquaculture have a significant positive impact. The sentiment series based on the Loughran-McDonald lexicon is found to have a negative and insignificant effect on stock returns. Hence, we expand the lexicon with industry-specific words. A negative shock to sentiment within the news related to competitors foreshadows a significant increase in returns owing to the market's competitive nature. Through our out-of-sample forecasting experiment, we find that the incorporation of news data can improve the predictive performance.
Global seafood production and markets have changed fundamentally since the 1970s. The main catalyst for this change is that landings from fisheries flattened out as most fish stocks were fully exploited if not overfished. However, despite strong demand this has not led to steep price increases typically associated with scarcity. Seafood has never been more available largely because of rapid growth of aquaculture production and globalized markets that can move seafood from locations where natural endowments are suitable for production to the large population centers that constitute the main markets. Moreover, as aquaculture is farming, the industry in not resource constrained in a similar fashion as fisheries, and as most aquaculture production is relatively crude, there is also a tremendous scope for further productivity growth as more knowledge is transferred from the agro-sciences. One can accordingly expect global seafood production to continue to grow rapidly.
Policies for mitigating the eutrophication of coastal waters typically focus on reducing land-based emissions. Fish and fisheries management have been suggested as a potentially efficient complementary measure. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the cost-effective achievement of targets for coastal water transparency with the help of adjusted harvesting strategies for predatory fish, biomanipulation of prey fish, and nutrient load mitigation, taking natural variations in water color into account. We develop an empirical steady-state bioeconomic model and apply it to two case areas along the Swedish Baltic Sea. Results show that prey fish stocks, which negatively affect water transparency, are reduced to a minimum in one study area, while an interior solution with a positive harvest is found in the other. Policies targeting fish management can be relevant for locally tailored strategies to mitigate eutrophication.
We analyze public preferences for oyster reef restoration, focusing on the US Gulf Coast, one of the leading oyster-producing regions in the US. We administer a contingent-valuation survey to 4,690 households across the region using a web survey instrument employing videos to convey key information and follow-up questions to mitigate hypothetical bias. We test for status-quo and scope effects, and compare a restricted sample of "high-quality" responses that are internally consistent against the full sample. We provide estimates of both household and aggregate willingness to pay and place these in the context on ongoing oyster restoration efforts and commercial landings. Results indicate that public support for oyster restoration, in terms of willingness to pay, exceeds current restoration expenditures and is consistent with the current market value of oysters. We also find that preferences are driven strongly by those who eat oysters as well as those who are saltwater anglers.
The challenge of achieving stable fisheries cooperative arrangements worldwide, at both the international and the domestic level, is increasingly important, but most game theoretic analyses of such arrangements have produced pessimistic results. Yet Elinor Ostrom and colleagues, emphasizing what might be termed social capital, refute these pessimistic results, at least at the domestic level. To date, there has been no effective way of incorporating such social capital into game theoretic models of fisheries. Focusing on the domestic level, this paper attempts to do just that. In so doing, the paper employs the concept of "club goods," where a club good is non-rivalrous, but excludable. The paper, commencing with a model involving a repeated game with trigger strategies, is extended to include the club good, with dramatic consequences for the stability of the game. Elinor Ostrom and colleagues stand vindicated. Extending this analysis to the international level is the next challenge.
Much uncertainty exists about the long-term effect of coral degradation on reef fishery yields. While previous studies have addressed this issue, empirical examinations of the fish-habitat linkage accounting for the stock dynamics are limited. We develop a bioeconomic model that integrates the fish population dynamics with coral reef habitat effects. We test the linkage between fish yield and live coral habitats and simulate the reductions in maximum sustainable yield (MSY) and maximum economic yield (MEY) due to live coral losses with data from the Great Barrier Reef (GBR). Results indicate dependency of fish yield on live coral cover for two GBR commercial fish species, to which substantial yield loss may occur because of live coral damage. Furthermore, results suggest a critical threshold of live coral coverage for these two species, below which maintaining equilibrium MEY becomes challenging.
