Many of the world's fisheries face major challenges including overfishing, overcapacity and low returns. Using recent developments in microeconomic theory and with numerous case studies and examples, this book shows how to measure efficiency, productivity, profitability, capacity of fishing fleets and how to improve fisheries management. The book will prove invaluable to researchers, students and professionals interested in understanding the problems in fisheries and how they may be overcome.

Many of the world's fisheries face major challenges including overfishing, overcapacity and low returns. Using recent developments in microeconomic theory and with numerous case-studies and examples, this book shows how to measure efficiency, productivity, profitability and capacity of fishing fleets and how to improve fisheries management. The book will prove invaluable to researchers, students and professionals interested in understanding the problems in fisheries and how they may be overcome.

This handbook is the most comprehensive and interdisciplinary work on marine conservation and fisheries management ever compiled. It is the first to bridge fisheries and marine conservation issues. Its innovative ideas, detailed case studies, and governance framework provide a global special perspective over time and treat problems in the high seas, community fisheries, industrial fishing, and the many interactions between use and non-use of the oceans. Its policy tools and ideas for overcoming the perennial problems of over fishing, habitat and biodiversity loss address the facts that many marine ecosystems are in decline and plagued by overexploitation due to unsustainable fishing practices. An outstanding feature of the book is the detailed case-studies on conservation practice and fisheries management from around the world. These case studies are combined with 'foundation' chapters that provide an overview of the state of the marine world and innovative and far reaching perspectives about how we can move forward to face present and future challenges.
The contributors include the world's leading fisheries scientists, economists, and managers. Ecosystem and incentive-based approaches are described and complemented by tools for cooperative, participatory solutions. Unique themes treated: fisher behavior and incentives for management beyond rights-based approaches; a synthesis of proposed 'solutions'; a framework for understanding and overcoming the critical determinants of the decline in fisheries, degradation of marine ecosystems, and poor socio-economic performance of many fishing communities; models for innovative policy instruments; a plan of action and adoption pathways to promote sustainable fishing practices globally.
Collectively, the handbook's many valuable contributions offer a way forward to both understanding and resolving the multifaceted problems facing the world's oceans.

During the past 10 years, there has been a significant increase in 1) the number of economists interested in commercial fishing and 2) the number of fisheries scientists interested in economics. The economics profession has been stimulated by the development of bioeconomic models which seek to maximize some measure of fishery performance subject to an equation (or equations describing the dynamics of the fish stock (or stocks). At the same time, economists have expanded their ability to model and estimate production relationships; that is, the technological relationships between inputs and outputs. Fisheries scientists, particularly those concerned with the management of commercial stocks, are more aware of the importance of economics in both formulating management objectives and in predicting how fishermen might respond to specific management policies. These lectures are an attempt to review the relatively recent advances in dynamic modeling and production theory as they relate to the economic management of single and multiple-species fisheries. They will also assess the impediments to applying modern production theory when estimating bioeconomic parameters. In the first lecture Jon Conrad reviews the relationship between 1) the production function, 2) the growth function, and 3) the yield-effort function for the single species fishery and extends these concepts to the multispecies fishery using the multiple output production function. The promise and problems inherent with duality-based approaches to estimating bioeconomic parameters are briefly discussed. In the second lecture Dale Squires reviews the early literature on fisheries production and examines in greater detail theassumptions underlying duality-based estimation techniques as they relate to multispecies production. In the third lecture Jim Kirkley discusses his recent empirical work on the New England trawler fleet. While the landings of individual species are aggregated into a single output index, two measures of effort are employed, and factor shares from the econometric analysis are compared with the results obtained from a cost simulator. A common theme running through all three lectures is the need for better data, particularly input and cost data, if duality-based theory is to be successfully applied to multispecies fisheries. With a better understanding of models and methods, it is hoped that economists within the NMFS and academia might be more effective in working together to establish the database necessary for modern production analysis. Such analysis seems necessary, though not sufficient, for rational fisheries management. Dr. Richard Marasco Lecture Coordinator