Econometric Analysis of the Factors Contributing to the Fish Price increase in Coastal Turfs in Japan: the Case of the income Pooling Fishery for Coastal Shrimp Sakuraebi (Sergia Lucens)

Abstract

While right-based managements have often been encouraged as effective management tools, few studies presented an empirical analysis on the effects of those systems. This paper focuses on a special form of Territorial Use Rights Fisheries called an income pooling system, and examines the effects of the system empirically. Income pooling system is a unique Japanese fishery management system where fishermen harvest fish cooperatively, and divide the total income based on a certain rule, in many cases equal distribution. The increase of fish price through control on landing amount and improvement of quality of fish is regarded as the main effect of the system in earlier studies, so we estimated the magnitude of the impact of two factors on the price of fish with econometric method. The results show that the two factors in fact have significant effects for the price changes. Also, the effect of the improvement of quality for the price is not negligible compared to that of control on landing amount. These results suggest that to improve the income of fishermen, the policy encouraging fishermen to improve the quality of fish is effective. This study can be regarded as one of the first attempts to use economic analysis to evaluate the economic performance of fishery management system