ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a brief historical survey of fishery economics to identify the several themes with which the broad literature has been concerned. It reviews the economic theoretic literature on forms of regulation of fishing. The fishery economist expected to justify his client’s fishery goals, such as effectively excluding potential fishermen from one social or economic grouping and conserving or protecting the stock for exploitation by another. Control of the size, speed, or fishing power of vessels is a very common device, being relatively easy to enforce, and having popular distributive aspects. Fisheries may be regulated to prevent the waste of labor and capital and promote the efficient allocation of resources. Marketable fishing rights are no longer the academic panaceas that they seemed in the early 1960s. Most of the theoretical “regulatory literature” simply arises in the process of examining models’ comparative static or dynamic properties.
