Demand for Hawaii Bottomfish Revisited: Incorporating Economics into Total Allowable Catch Management

摘要

The reauthorized Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (2007) mandates the establishment of catch quotas for all federal fisheries by 2011. This regulatory tool has a direct effect on fishers, in terms of landings and revenues, but also has implications for consumers and downstream firms as ex-vessel price variations, caused by management actions, travel through the market chain. There are also ecosystem effects of this regulatory structure, as quota levels may shift fishing effort to non-regulated species and consumer demand may lean towards species substitutable in the marketplace. Additionally, in the modern globalized economy, domestic regulations offer opportunities for foreign producers to contribute to domestic markets in attempts to satisfy market demand. In the case of the Hawaii bottomfish fishery, stock assessment scientists are able to advise fishery managers of the biological implications of total allowable catch (TAC) management in terms of the risk to overfishing and biomass levels (Brodziak, et al., 2009). However, the economic implications of this new management regime are poorly understood. A challenge inherent in assessing the economics of fishery management regulations is that the benefits from fisheries regulations often come from future increases in the health of fish populations, while the costs come from the current reductions in quantities harvested. The role of economics in the context of ecosystem management is to provide information to help allocate scarce resources to produce desired states of nature consistent with the societal goal of maintaining a level of ecosystem health and resilience (Wagner et al., 1998). Successful fishery management decisions require considerations of economic interrelationships as well as biological ones. However, fishery managers currently do not have adequate estimates of the demand structure within the Hawaii bottomfish fishery, as the sole existing demand analysis in the literature was conducted more than two decades ago (Pooley, 1987). This research introduces a generalized inverse demand system, as applied to the Hawaii bottomfish fishery, to determine the market linkages among various fish species in the Hawaii bottomfish market and explore economic considerations for TAC management.