Advantages and disadvantages of introducing strong user rights in fisheries. A literature review

Abstract

User rights are an important topic in discussions of fisheries management. A user right can be defined as right to harvest from fish stocks; therefore, these rights are seen as a subset of property rights. Economists would normally argue that strong user rights (SURFs) should be implemented for fisheries, but the introduction of SURFs. affects a society in a complex way. By conducting a literature review, we have identified the advantages and disadvantages of introducing SURFs. We are mainly interested in short-run and long-run efficiency-related economic effects, but we have also identified major nonefficiency-related economic effects, social effects and environmental or biological effects. Due to the disadvantages we will also briefly discuss alternatives to SURFs