An application of life-cycle theory to the West of Scotland cod fishery

• Main Author: Rodgers, Philip
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: EAFE 2015
• Subjects: L190 Economics not elsewhere classified; atlantic cod
• Online Access: https://eprints.lincoln.ac.uk/id/eprint/17731/; https://eprints.lincoln.ac.uk/id/eprint/17731/1/__tsclient_D_EAFE_EAFEpaper2015CodVIa.docx

This paper applies a life-cycle approach to the West of Scotland fishery for atlantic cod. It acknowledges the fish stock as a harvestable resource regardless of growth levels and drops the assumption usually accepted in fishery models that a long-run non-zero bioeconomic equilibrium will develop where the catch and growth will be equal. Instead, successive short-run economic equilibria develop at the cost of long-run equilibrium. The impact of this is to treat the growth and output as corrections to the volume of the fish stock reserve. A second consequence is that the control variable representing the presence of the fish stock in the production function can be re-defined to accommodate it. The model simulates the rise and fall of the fishery from 1950 to 2011 and calculates the coefficients of a production function.