The Pedigree of Fishery Economics

Abstract

This paper was written as thanks for compliments offered at award proceedings at the 2010 IIFET. It deals with the past and future of fishery economics. A short historical account (or “pedigree”) shows that while fisheries have been mentioned by historians of old economies, their writings chiefly covered only the fish trade. This was also true of early economists, such as Petty and Adam Smith. It was marine biologists who were to show the way. Around the time of the Great War, the first bits of genuine fishery economic analysis appeared. These, however, were generally disregarded until Scott Gordon’s 1954 article caused what Thomas Kuhn calls a “revolution.” My own paper appeared a year later. There followed what looked like decades of comparative calmness in ocean economics. The advent of individual catch quotas has now widened and deepened the interest in fishery problems and those “paradigms” related to them, such as those appropriate to fishery self-government. The new problems and possibilities have drawn in lively and creative participants. They work in the front ranks of applied economics, and the author is proud to have been honoured by them.