While the science supporting fisheries management has generally been dominated by the natural sciences, there has been a growing recognition that managing fisheries essentially means managing economic systems. Indeed, over the past seven decades, economic ideas and insights have increasingly come to play a role in fisheries management and policy. As an illustration of this, the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) has been actively seeking to expand the scope of its scientific expertise beyond natural sciences [another inter-governmental marine science organization which has done this over the same period is the North Pacific Marine Science organization (PICES)]. In particular, the recently created ICES Working Group on Economics set out to review current work and key future needs relating to economic research and management advice on marine capture fisheries. This article presents the results of this review and addresses how economic research can be incorporated into the science of ICES to provide integrated perspectives on fisheries systems that can contribute to the provision of advice in support of policy development and management decision-making for sustainable uses of living marine resources.

Indicators of the economic performance of fishing vessels are frequently computed in various countries. In this paper, we use different types of information to assess capital value and the economic performance of fishing vessels. On the one hand, field surveys provide technical and financial information on the main components of fishing capital. On the other hand, book values are given in bookkeeping databases. We use both sources of information on fishing capital are used for the same set of vessels, namely the commercial fishing fleet of the French region of Brittany. Based on these two sources, measures of economic performance can be produced for the short term using gross surplus; and for the long term including the cost of capital. The measures of performance obtained are presented and the differences between them are then discussed.