ABSTRACT
Many governments have well-developed arrangements governing oil company access to offshore oil and gas based on lease block systems. Entry is by no means “open access”, the main cause of uneconomic exploitation of fisheries resources. Governments also have well-developed methods for sharing excess profits with oil companies, taking the form of lease block auctions, royalty payments and oil taxation; many governments do in fact collect a good deal of available economic rents. There is some irony in this as it is powerful “big oil” that is subjected to constraints imposed by governments aimed at rational resource exploitation and rent sharing, while much smaller fishing companies are able to fight off similar constraints with obvious negative results for the state of the world’s fisheries.
