Toward a General Model of Fishery Production

Abstract

Traditionally, analysis of fishery production has been a domain of the biologist and a branch of population dynamics. During the past two decades or so, economists have tried to integrate production economics with fishery biology, but the resulting economic theory of the fisheries, while recognizing the biological relationships, has neglected a deeper treatment of production economics. Thus, despite its usefulness and wide acceptance, the received theory suffers from certain substantive problems from the point of view of general applicability. First, some of the most important aspects of production cannot be analyzed within the conventional single-input model. Second, there is a practical difficulty in the measurement of the single input, independently and/or in connection with the index number problem. Third, there is an emphasis on the biological aspect of fishery resource, especially stock externality, to the exclusion of the spatial distribution of fishing effort; consequently, the crowding externality does not receive sufficient attention. We will develop a general analytical framework in which the theory of production and population dynamics are integrated into a fishery production model. In a twofactor input model, resource stock externality is explained by the population dynamics, while crowding externality is explained by analyzing the size distribution of inputs. A concept of nonhomogeneous input is introduced to analyze the relations between externalities, the size distribution, and production. In the remainder of this section we briefly set forth the accepted theory of fishery production. Section 2 provides a theoretical background for the general model; this is followed by an introduction and elaboration of the theory of nonhomogeneous input and production. It will be seen, in this process, that size distribution analysis of factor input is an important catalyst. Section 4 presents our general fishery production function (GFPF) which, we believe, is applicable to most fisheries.