ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the economic theory of natural resource utilization as it pertains to the fishing industry. Fishery resources are unusual in the fact of their common-property nature; but they are not unique, and similar problems are encountered in other cases of common-property resource industries, such as petroleum production, and hunting and trapping. The most vivid thread that runs through the biological literature is the effort to determine the effect of fishing on the stock of fish in the sea. The theory of optimum utilization of fishery resources and the reasons for its frustration in practice are developed for a typical demersal fish. An analysis of the bionomic equilibrium of the fishing industry may be approached in terms of several problems. The analysis of the conditions of stable equilibrium raises some points of general theoretical interest. The law of diminishing returns is much more difficult to sustain in the case of fisheries than in agriculture or industry.
