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Essays on the management of fisheries in the presence of strategic interactions

University of British Columbia

The following three essays present an analysis that combines well-known models of fisheries management with contemporary theories of international trade and industrial organization. The general theme of the thesis is that countries' fisheries management policies can affect the strategic interaction between their fishing industries. The first essay examines the problem of noncooperative management of international fisheries by analyzing the strategic rent-shifting roles for such well-known national management policies as fleet licensing and effort subsidies. It is shown that the noncooperative equilibrium in each policy takes the form of a prisoner's dilemma with dissipated rents in the fishery. It is also shown that strategic effort subsidies can only lead to incomplete rent dissipation but strategic fleet licensing can lead to complete rent dissipation. The second essay develops a theory of cooperative management of international fisheries by considering negotiation between countries over the same fleet licensing and effort subsidy policies considered in the first essay. The outcomes of negotiation over these policies are compared to the corresponding noncooperative outcomes, on the one hand, and to the efficient outcome on the other. It is shown that negotiation over effort subsidies in the absence of side payments is efficient, but negotiation over fleet sizes in the absence of side payments is inefficient. The third essay develops a two-stage two-period model of a 'domestic' country and a 'foreign' country whose respective fishing industries harvest from separate fisheries for the same international market. The domestic country uses a harvest policy to regulate the harvest by its fishing industry, but the harvest by the foreign fishing industry is unregulated. Two types of fisheries are considered. In the case of schooling fisheries, the domestic country may choose a conservative harvest policy in the first period if it can induce the biological collapse of the foreign fishery in the second period. In the case of search fisheries, the domestic country always chooses a conservative harvest policy in the first period in order to induce the economic degradation of the foreign fishery in the second period. The results suggest that international fisheries trade in the presence of divergent national fisheries management regimes could have unexpected consequences for world fisheries.

Thesis/Dissertation

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2009-07-02

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/9971

Economics

University of British Columbia

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