Unreported landings across the EU Exclusive Economic Zones: The role of regional governance and social capital

Abstract

Rule compliance is a ubiquitous problem. However, in the case of institutions for managing fisheries, the sustainability of the resource and means of subsistence for around 60 million people worldwide [1] is at stake. In the EU, a substantial part of the commercial stocks are outside their biological limits. The rules that have been enacted may go in the right direction, but they suffer from enforcement deficiencies. This paper addresses the issue of compliance with the catch-reporting obligation in the EU, using as an indicator the proportion of landing catches that have been reported (versus unreported) to authorities. The results show that, besides purely economic and fishing-specific drivers, there is a relevant effect of institutional and sociocultural factors on the likelihood of rule compliance. Specifically, they revealed the important effects of regional governance quality and social capital on compliance, which are robust in the presence of fishing-specific (gear type and commercial group fixed effects, market value and overcapacity) and socioeconomic controls (regional GDP per capita, level of education, unemployment, inequality or poverty).