Fisheries Management Costs in Thai Marine Fisheries

The paper first introduces the fisheries management dilemma faced by many Asian developing countries including Thailand and the key elements of a transition policy towards responsible fisheries. It then analyses current fisheries management costs in Thai marine fisheries. Major cost items include fisheries research (especially stock assessment), monitoring, control and surveillance, the placement of artificial reefs to rehabilitate inshore resources and to act as barrier against bottom trawling, and management administration. It then examines the required adjustments needed for improved management in order to increase the flow of net economic benefits and to reduce conflicts among fishermen using different types of fishing gear. The authors argue that in the Thai situation characterized by significant over-capacities large up-front adjustment costs arise in the transition to an effective fisheries management regime. These include compensation for the withdrawal of excessive fleet capacity, costs of facilitating the shift to alternative employment, and other incremental fisheries management costs. On the example of the Thai demersal fisheries in the Gulf of Thailand, it is shown that these large up-front adjustment costs could be recuperated in the long run through increased fishing licence fees but that the immediate financial needs may pose a heavy burden on the government budget that may justify external financial assistance.Keywords: Thai marine fisheries; management costs; decommissioning; bio-economic analysis

Global Trends in Capture Fisheries, With an Estimate of Global Losses in Marine Fisheries Resource Rents

Trends in key fisheries indicators are presented to provide the context for a profile of the economic health of the world's marine fisheries. Estimates of the economic value of global marine fishery production and costs of production are used as inputs to an economic model to derive a range of estimates of potential economic rents lost, largely as a result of mismanagement of the marine fisheries worldwide

A Fishery Manager's Guidebook, Second Edition

A Fishery Managers' Guidebook was first published as an FAO Fisheries Technical Paper in 2002 to meet the need for information and guidance on the broad and often complex task of fisheries management. Based on subsequent experience and feedback gained from publication of the first edition, this new volume, has been expanded to provide broader coverage of the key elements of the task and updated in order to keep track of the rapid developments in theory and practice as academics and practitioners struggle to confront the many challenges facing modern fisheries management

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

A value-based individual transferable quota scheme - a preliminary examination of its suitability as a fisheries management technique

An ITQ scheme has been shown to create a quota induced incentive for discarding of fish in excess of what is socially optimal. This finding is corroborated by empirical evidence in several ITQ managed fisheries. The incentive for discarding, over and above those expected in an unmanaged or input controlled fishery, may arise because of two reasons: firstly, in the case of a single species fishery, it can be advantageous to substitute low priced with high priced size classes of fish thereby increasing the value of a given quota; secondly, where transaction costs in quota trading are high, species may be discarded for which no quota is held or for which catches have surmounted current quota holdings. The proposed approach of assigning value based individual transferable quotas (VITQs) would remove the quota induced incentive for high grading, and can reduce costs of quota trading. Furthermore, in the case of multi species fisheries, VITQs may allow fishermen to respond with greater flexibility to changes in species abundances than under an ITQ system, and may confer greater economic stability. A value based individual quota would assign a maximum landed value of the catch, which could be taken in a certain period of time (e.g. year). The catch would be composed of a basket of pre determined species or would need to be taken from one or several assigned fishing zones areas, or a combination of both. The proposed system may depict a compensatory mechanism against excessive targeting of any one single species, but if this could result in a desirable exploitation, pattern would depend on growth rates catchability coefficients and price elasticities of the various species in the basket or fishing zone.KEYWORDS: Fishery management, Individual transferable quota

Stock and (possibly) path dependent technologies

According to conventional economic wisdom the economically more efficient technology will always outcompete the less efficient. This hypothesis has usually been taken to hold for the exploitation of common pool renewable natural resources such as fish stocks. This paper claims that, while this is not necessarily false, it may be too optimistic. The paper shows that what constitutes the most efficient technology may switch depending on biomass size. It also shows that once effective fisheries management is introduced and biomass recovers, a return to the initially most efficient technology may not be possible because of its embeddedness in traditional knowledge and institutions which might have become forgotten or lost. Thus, there may be a degree of technological irreversibilty in fisheries and other natural reource utilization. The paper’s findings seem relevant to many situations in developing countries fisheries where labour- intensive technologies are displaced by more capital-intensive technologies, often introduced with government subsidies. The uncontrolled expansion of the latter then creates the condition, i.e. reduced stock sizes, especially in inshore areas, that disadvantages the intially more efficient labour-intensive technologies