ABSTRACT
Governments spend significant financial resources on fisheries management, especially on enforcement, research and management administration. For many of the world's fishing nations, the large government expenditures on fishery management services impose significant burdens on both taxpayers and the regulated fishing community. The shift towards user charges accelerated in the 1980s and is penetrating fishery management. There are several issues to be resolved when designing cost recovery programmes for fisheries. Since there are multiple methods for recovering costs, it's important to consider the advantages and disadvantages of the different types of user charges and financing mechanisms. This chapter examines the issue by formally considering the application of a royalty to recover the cost of enforcement in a fishery. It develops a formal model of cost recovery in a fishery and uses the model to analyse how the use of a royalty to recover enforcement costs affects bioeconomic outcomes and fishery management policies.
