Measures of the Fishing Capacity of Chinese Marine Fleets and Discussion of the Methods

Abstract

The peak-to-peak (PTP) and data envelopment analyses (DEA) methods were used in a quantitative study of the marine fishing capacity in China. The results showed that: the better input index in the PTP methodology is total power rather than number of ships when measuring the Chinese marine fishing capacity. urther analyses made it clearer that the excess of marine fishing capacity in China is primarily an excess of total power of fishing ships. This paper then suggests that the number of ships should be reduced by 35.2 percent, the gross tonnage should be reduced by 29.8 percent and the total power by 37.3 percent in China, if the current marine catch stays at the 1999 base line level. The discussion proposes the idea of supplement peak year. We also discovered that the PTP methodology is suitable for market economics and is better as a longitudinal analysis in time arrays, but the DEA approach is useful for the transverse comparison of fishing capacity in a given time period. The analyses also showed that the capacity, which has been based on the practical catch, is commonly underestimated. Therefore the fishing capacity reduction required in practice is generally larger than the value given by calculation.