Towards a Predictive Model for the Economic Regulation of Commercial Fisheries

A model of the commercial fishery, incorporating the microeconomic decisions of individual vessel operation, is developed and employed to predict the consequences of various methods of regulation, including: (i) total catch quotas; (ii) vessel licenses; (iii) taxes on catch (or effort); (iv) allocated catch (or effort) quotas. Among the principal predictions of the analysis are: (a) total catch quotas do not improve the economic performance of an open-access fishery; (b) limited entry results in distortion of inputs unless every input is controlled; (c) taxes and allocated transferable catch quotas are theoretically equivalent to one another in terms of economic efficiency, and both are capable in principle of optimizing exploitation of the common-property fishery.Key words: economics, fishery regulation, management, quotas, licenses, taxes, fishermen's quotas, common-property resource