APPLICATIONS OF DUAL THEORY IN FISHERIES: A SURVEY

This paper surveys empirical studies that utilize the theory of the firm and dual theory to reveal economic and technological conditions of fish harvesting firms. The dual approach is highly suitable for revealing disaggregated structures in fishing processes that consist of several inputs and outputs. Building on the functional forms of cost, profit, or revenue functions, the dual approach has improved our understanding of technological production conditions based on data at firm level. This is done by addressing a variety of different technological issues for multispecies harvesting firms, such as transformation between species, substitution between fishing inputs, economies of scope and scale, industrial organization, etc. Moreover, the approach has been useful as a means of providing information on public management of resource exploitation by dealing with various regulatory regimes; i.e., input management, output management, and prospects for future regulation. The purpose of this paper is to review theoretical issues and empirical results with respect to fishing gear and regulatory regimes.Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Centralised versus Decentralised Enforcement of Fish Quotas

The purpose of this article is to consider under what circumstances it is better to have centralised enforcement of catch quotas and when it is better to leave enforcement to the countries themselves. It is shown for a two-country case that a welfare gain is obtained under centralised enforcement at the federal level. The result depends critically on the difference in the unit cost of enforcement at the federal and the Member State (regional) level. If the Member States have a sufficiently large cost advantage in enforcing quotas, they can be better off under decentralised enforcement. In addition, the result depends on the proportion of foreign fishermen in the domestic fishing zone. The higher the proportion of foreign fishermen in the domestic zone, the better the decentralised enforcement of quotas.Quota enforcement policy, fisheries management, Industrial Organization, International Relations/Trade, Political Economy, Q22, Q28.,

Jointness through fishing days input in a multi-species Fishery

Some multi-species fisheries are characterised by production jointness in the sense that several species are caught through a joint production process (literally in the same haul of the net). Other multi-species fisheries (so called purse seine fisheries) are specialized in the sense that species are targeted individually and by-catch is negligible, but over the fishing season the same boat chooses to target several species with varying intensity which also results in a sort of jointness. Both types of fisheries are typically modelled using standard multi-input multi-output profit function forms (e.g. translog, normalized quadratic). In this paper we argue that jointness in the latter, essentially separable fishery is caused by allocation of fishing days input among harvested species. We developed a structural model of a multi-species fishery where the allocation of fishing days input causes production jointness. We estimate the model for the Norwegian purse seine fishery and find that it is characterised by non-jointness, while estimations for this fishery using the standard multi-input multi-output profit function imply jointness.production jointness, multi-species fisheries, structural modeling

A Critical Review of the Common Fisheries Policy

The paper embodies an evaluation of the fishery policy at EU level. The common fishery policy is designed to solve a complex set of problems that emerge in the sector. This embodies on the one hand that the fishery policy is directed towards objectives that have their offspring in different theoretical paradigms for conservation, rationalisation and the community. On the other hand, the common fishery policy is also accommodates to solve the conflicting interests of the Member States; for example the resource sharing. The analysis in the paper shows that the Common Fishery Policy is based on inconsistent objectives, which arise as a consequence of the attempt to formulate a policy that deals with mutually conflicting objectives at the same time. The paper takes its outline in describing elements in the historical process of the development of the common fisheries policy. It is found that the issue of equal or restricted access to the fish resource has had an important influence on the formulating of the historical policies as it is also has today. In the analysis of the current fishery policy the paper primarily places its focus on the elements of the policies for conservation, structure and control, their objectives and means. It is indicated that the implemented policies do not state solution that entirely prevents the distortions of overfishery and overcapitalisation present in the classical open access fishery. This is e.g. seen in the structural policy, where the Member States are not prevented from acting strategically in order to pursue their own interests. Moreover, the control policy shows that the EU has had difficulties in implementing a reliable policy, which would prevent the Member States from using the control policy in their own favour by implementing a laissez faire policy, and thereby indirectly benefit from their national fishing industries.Common fishery policy, fisheries conflicts, conservation policy, structural policy, control policy

The effect of providing free autopoweroff plugs to households on electricity consumption - A field experiment

Experimental evidence of the effect of providing cheap energy saving technology to households is sparse. We present results from a field experiment in which autopoweroff plugs are provided free of charge to randomly selected households. We use propensity score matching to find treatment effects on metered electricity consumption for different types of households. We find effects for single men and couples without children, while we find no effect for single women and households with children. We suggest that this could be because of differences in saving potential (e.g. some households do not have appliances where using a plug is relevant), differences in the skills relevant for installing the technology and differences in the willingness to spend time and effort on installation. We conclude that targeting interventions at more responsive households, and tailoring interventions to target groups, can increase efficiency of programmes.autopoweroff plugs, treatment effect, energy consumption, types of households

Attending to the reasons for attribute non-attendance in Choice Experiments

This paper focuses on behavioural reasons underlying stated attribute non-attendance. In order to identify and incorporate procedures for dealing with heterogeneous attribute processing strategies, we ask respondents follow-up questions regarding their reasons for ignoring attributes. Based on these statements, we conclude that the standard way of assigning a zero impact of ignored attributes on the likelihood is inappropriate. We find that some respondents act in accordance with the passive bounded rationality assumption since they ignore an attribute simply because it does not affect their utility. Excluding these genuine zero preferences, as the standard approach essentially does, might bias results. Other respondents claim to have ignored attributes to simplify choices. However, we find that these respondents have actually not completely ignored attributes. We argue along the rationally adaptive behavioural model that preferences are indeed elicited in these cases, and we show how using a scaling approach can appropriately weight these observations in the econometric model. Finally, we find that some respondents ignore attributes for protest-like reasons which essentially convey no information about preferences. We suggest that using the standard approach combined with weighting procedures and recoding of non-attendance statements conditional on the specific reasons for non-attendance could be more appropriate than the current standard way of taking stated non-attendance into account.choice experiment, attribute non-attendance, passive bounded rationality, rationally adaptive behaviour, error component logit model