Public ownership versus private ownership: An examination of the economics and law of property in marine fisheries.

摘要

Common property fisheries have figured prominently in economic analyses of property rights. Open access leads to waste that would not occur if fisheries were exclusive property of private owners.; Historical factors have led to persistent enforcement of common access to American fisheries. While there is a tradition of private fishing rights in English law, there is also a failure to adequately distinguish the use of water for transportation, where common access is optimal, from fishing, where common access is not optimal. English law was also transformed in early America due to the greater abundance of fish and game and due the influence of William Blackstone.; A case study in this dissertation reaches the conclusion that the supply of fishermen to a fishery is less than perfectly elastic, contrary to the usual assumption. This finding indicates that changes in property rights and regulations have predictable long-term effects on the incomes of individual fishermen. Previous results that sole ownership leads to optimal resource use are qualified and extended to situations where private ownership is distributed over many individuals. It is shown that distributing private rights to former users of common property promotes optimal harvesting and increases the incomes of those former users. These results extend to cases where production is governed by both harvesting and cultivation.