Page 10, Evaluations and Policy Explorations Subsidies and Their Potential Impact on The Management of the Ecosystems of the North Atlantic
This paper provides both an estimate and assessment of subsidies in fisheries in the North Atlantic. The sub-sidies are estimated, on the basis of data taken from an OECD study and the Sea Around Us Project database, to be in the order of U.S. $ 2.0 to 2.5 billion per year. The assessment of the imp...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Other Authors: | |
| Format: | Text |
| Language: | English |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.621.7076 http://www.seaaroundus.org/report/impactpolicy/munro.pdf |
| Summary: | This paper provides both an estimate and assessment of subsidies in fisheries in the North Atlantic. The sub-sidies are estimated, on the basis of data taken from an OECD study and the Sea Around Us Project database, to be in the order of U.S. $ 2.0 to 2.5 billion per year. The assessment of the impact of the subsidies upon re-source management and sustainability requires an ex-amination of the underlying economics of subsidies in fisheries. There is general agreement, to which we sub-scribe, that fisheries subsidies do great harm by exac-erbating the problems arising from the ‘common pool’ aspects of capture fisheries. Many economists, how-ever, believe it that, if the “common pool ” aspects of a fishery could be removed by, for example, establishing a fully-fledged property rights system, the negative im-pact of fisheries subsidies would prove to be trivial. This paper demonstrates that the aforementioned com-fortable belief is unfounded. Fisheries subsidies can be seriously damaging, even if the ‘common pool ’ aspects of the fishery are removed. There is also a widely held belief, among economists and government officials, that subsidies used for vessel decommissioning schemes, far from being harmful, actually have a bene-ficial impact upon resource management and sustain-ability. About twenty percent of the fisheries subsidies in the North Atlantic are directed towards these pur-poses. In this paper, we argue that these seemingly beneficial subsides can, in fact, be highly negative in their impact. |
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