ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the role of economics in designing well-managed fisheries and consider how the process of fisheries management could be reformed to improve both efficiency and sustainability. Aquaculture is currently the fastest-growing animal food production sector. Privatization of commercial fisheries, namely through fish farming, has been touted as a solution to the overfishing problem. Unlimited access to common-pool resources reduces net benefits so drastically that this loss encourages those harvesting the resource to band together to restrict access, if possible. An increasing reliance on individual transferable quotas and territorial use rights fisheries offers the possibility of preserving stocks without jeopardizing the incomes of those men and women currently harvesting those stocks. The chapter focuses on fisheries as an example of a renewable biological resource, but the models and the insights that flow from them can be used to think about managing other wildlife populations as well.
