Subsidies in World Fisheries: A Reexamination

Abstract

Fisheries in the world are reaching a turning point. Many of the traditional most highly valued stocks are fully or overexploited in a biological sense; in economic terms most fisheries employ excessive fishing effort to reach current levels of production. Ineffective management systems will govern exploitation of most major fishing stocks. Paradoxically, fisheries management effectiveness is being undermined by the very subsidies that are provided to maintain fisheries sector income. This study examines the role of subsidies in explaining the obvious and injurious mismatch between fishing effort and biological production capacity. It uses the definition and methodology of the World Trade Organization on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures of 1994 in defining the nature and size of subsidies to the sector and their impact, based on case studies for Japan, the European Union, Norway, the United States, Russia, and China. It covers the subsidies explicitly covered in the WTO agreement--including those that that are part of public budgets covering operations in local and foreign waters, and unbudgeted subsidies--including subsidized sectoral lending, tax preferences, cross-sectoral subsidies, and infrastructure. In addition, subsidies that are implied by the WTO agreement, like resource rent subsidies and conservation subsidies are assessed in some detail.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 160 citations exist upstream.