ABSTRACT
In the decades following World War II, the Soviet Union moved most of the capital and labor in its fishing fleets to the Pacific Coast. Although the Soviet fleet was slow in developing, the effort has brought significant pressure in Soviet waters on the various species that are already heavily exploited in neighboring Japanese waters. Most of the species are really shared between the exclusive economic zones of the two nations. In this chapter, a detailed survey is made documenting the extent of sharing by the species. For this reason, it is argued that the Law of the Sea principle of surplus catch may be an inefficient means of allocation of these fisheries resources. More efficient and more in keeping with the law of comparative advantage may be to consider them common property resources and to pool them between the two countries. This would allow division of labor by species and specialization.
