ABSTRACT
In all resources, it is fundamental that the realisation of them has to be economically viable, and that enterprises dependent on them should ‘pay their way’. In fishing reliable economic assessments may not, however, be a straightforward matter: even now there is often a serious shortage of data for economic analysis, especially in the Third World. It is also the case that the majority of the world’s fishermen are still small operators and that many of them are partly dependent on fishing (and indeed on other activities) for subsistence; and they may keep few if any formal records, and indeed many of them are still illiterate.
