ABSTRACT
This survey investigates the background and development of discrete time age-structured optimization problems in fishery economics. The origin of these models is in the single cohort analysis and static equilibrium models developed in fishery ecology. The central assumption in these models is nonselective fishing gear, with the consequence that fishing effort is the single control variable. Most of the early dynamic models took recruitment as an exogenous constant and suggested that a periodic solution was the only optimality candidate. Later numerical computation shows that under some parameter values the optimal solution may converge toward a stable steady state with constant harvest and stable population. Detailed understanding of various factors that determine whether the long-run solution represents periodic or constant harvesting is still lacking. This survey shows a route to study these models analytically in addition to performing numerical computation.
