Modelling Fishermen Behaviour under New Management Regimes: Final report

A traditional fisheries management scheme generates incentives to maximize a vessels share of the catch and encourages a ‘race to fish’. Individual vessel quota management schemes change the incentives to eliminate the ‘race to fish’ and have the potential to generate resource rent. An interesting question is whether it is the changed incentives due to individual quota or the capacity reduction due to transferability of individual quota that is most important in generating rent. In this study, the cost function approach is used to model the production technology for a fishery regulated with individual vessel quotas. We measure rent generated and potential rent in a fishery managed with individual vessel quotas at the vessel as well as the fleet level given the total quota and vessel type for the fishery. Country studies for Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Sweden and the UK show that only at Iceland where the individual quotas are highly transferable is any rent generated. The rent potential is, however, in general high and often more then 50% of landing value. To realise these rents, a substantial reduction of the fleet is necessary.