Fishing about and about fishing

Management economics what's missing?

A guide to heartless, soulless, cold strategies

 

Almost 30 years ago Prof. Lee G. Anderson's wrote The Economics of Fisheries Management and it was then one of a kind in its field. He revised it in 1986 and now we have the 2004 reprint. It is a bit like the 'parson's nose' - all right in parts. Of course, the domain of fisheries economics has expanded greatly and a 22-page list of references shows how much has been written about this area since the first days. In that sense, this book can still serve as a basic text for students and practitioners. 

However, it does mean that you have to go along with "the simple 'Schaefer's model', where recruitment, individual growth, and natural mortality are lumped together in a simple population dynamics equation". The idea is that the model enables theoretical analysis of the economics of fisheries management in a tractable manner. Prof. Anderson was careful to make the point that in his future writings he would pay more attention to rights-based fisheries, Individual Transferable Quotas (ITQs), marine reserves, and replace Schaefer's model with age-structured ones, and he quite rightly apologises for hardly discussing "the many facets of fisheries management".

And even then, today's readers, while perhaps agreeing with his analysis of the faults of open access, may question the real value and reality of some of the author's basic postulations -- such as the notion of general equilibrium in an economy, or of that in a fish population. Hence, they may question also the various consequent concepts: for example, "maximum economic yield (MEY) over time", or "stationary MEY" that would occur when "catch equals growth" and "population size will not change", and in other situations that hardly ever happen.

Misnomer

So, the title of this book is rather a misnomer. The book introduces a methodology for theoretical economic analysis of fisheries, which is supposed to help us assess the economic results of different types of management. But there's nothing in it about the economics of the management itself. If the book's contents were to be consistent with its title, it should be dealing predominantly with the costs and benefits of the very management system. Such a study would help governments build up feasible fishery management institutions, appropriate to the economic value of the respective fisheries on one hand and steering clear of creating expensive bureaucracies. It is precisely the apparatchiki of such 'ocracies, along with their scientific and technical infrastructure, who may be top-heavy and economically unfeasible when it comes to managing fisheries.

The economics of fisheries management should also examine situations in which management is ineffective, or causes more harm than benefit. It should identify economic losses due to management blunders, for example, when we allow excessive fishing when it should've been already curbed, or the opposite -- the needless restraint of fishing effort. Such bloomers happen when management adheres to concepts such as the above-mentioned equilibrium in a fish population, "MEY over time", "stationary MEY", and the like, assuming that the size of fish stocks is predominantly controlled by fishing mortality, while neglecting the fluctuating physical and biological factors that greatly affect natural mortality and recruitment.

Any application of the economics of fisheries management should also focus, for example, on the costs to a fishery and the society which result when management fails to tackle destruction and pollution of coastal habitats, these being essential for the propagation of commercial fish and food organisms. It should consider the cost when a fishery is managed by size regulation. Due to prolonged creaming off of the larger and faster growing individuals, even before they're able to procreate, this can lead to genetic dwarfism.

Frozen economics

Anderson defines fishery economics as: "...the study of the optimal allocation of resources to a fishery in such a way that the value of production is maximised". 

He writes that, in spite of the fact that the "...models presented here contain many simplifications..." they're"...surprisingly accurate in predicting behaviour[sic] of the players on the economic stage and also in formulating policy recommendations". Unfortunately, the author doesn't provide a single piece of proof for the above, despite the fact that he could have chosen any of the many well-documented fisheries in the world and applied his models to their historical data ("hind-casting") to show how such models would perform. 

If fishery economics is to be applicable then it requires much more than what so-called "Management Economics" can offer. Just putting up graphs, mathematical formulae and models doesn't make it a science. Hence, I cannot agree with the author when he writes: "If we had perfect (or at least very good) information on the biological and economic parameters involved, and if resources were easily transferable..." - the conclusions derived - "...could be used in straightforward manner in regulating fisheries", because the framework he proposes is totally estranged from real-world fisheries.

Yes, he's right in saying that "...institutional and "people" [his inverted commas] problems prevent rapid movement of resources from one use to another". But people's problems and considerations are almost totally absent from his economics. So are any externalities, hidden or open, including social costs of secondary economic effects of any change in legislation, regulation and management policy. Making a given fishery more "efficient" by Anderson's definition may be so costly to most fishing people, the society at large and the taxpayers' purse, that only a selected group would enjoy the financial gains.

People first

This book is a guide to heartless, soulless, cold economics that shun actual situations, and turn nature, fish and people into abstract, mechanical, virtual entities that have little to do with ecosystems and society. The book's examples steer clear of any existing fishery; they're all conjured up, strictly theoretical and devoid of any connection to a breathing and active fishing industry.

The good news about this book is that it may help to train students in methods of theoretical economic analysis, but the very bad news is that it may lead people into thinking that they may apply such a frozen economic theory to the complex realities of the fishing world. While this book may be useful for analysing past situation and processes and, perhaps, also some current ones, it should be unthinkable to use it as a guide for policymaking and fishery regulation.