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Subsidies are widely criticized in fisheries management for promoting global fishing capacity growth and overharvesting. Scientists worldwide have thus called for a ban on "harmful" subsidies that artificially increase fishing profits, resulting in the recent agreement among members of the World Trade Organization to eliminate such subsidies. The argument for banning harmful subsidies relies on the assumption that fishing will be unprofitable after eliminating subsidies, incentivizing some fishermen to exit and others to refrain from entering. These arguments follow from open-access governance regimes where entry has driven profits to zero. Yet many modern-day fisheries are conducted under limited-access regimes that limit capacity and maintain economic profits, even without subsidies. In these settings, subsidy removal will reduce profits but perhaps without any discernable effect on capacity. Importantly, until now, there have been no empirical studies of subsidy reductions to inform us about their likely quantitative impacts. In this paper, we evaluate a policy reform that reduced fisheries subsidies in China. We find that China's subsidy reductions accelerated the rate at which fishermen retired their vessels, resulting in reduced fleet capacity, particularly among older and smaller vessels. Notably, the reduction of harmful subsidies was only partly responsible for reducing fleet capacity; an increase in vessel retirement subsidies was also a necessary driver of capacity reduction. Our study demonstrates that the efficacy of removing harmful subsidies depends on the policy environment in which removals occur.

Prohibited species catch (PSC) by the groundfish fleet in the Bering Sea has been a persistent and mounting policy concern since the early 1990s. Prohibited species are those species that are prohibited for retention by the groundfish fleet, often in an effort to sustain lucrative targeted fisheries for these species. The allowable catch of these species is controlled by the allocation of fleet-wide quotas to particular gear and fishery target combinations. For instance, those fleets using bottom-trawl gear to catch yellowfin sole in the Eastern Bering Sea are limited in the quantities of Pacific halibut, C. bairdi tanner crab, and red king crab that they can catch in a given fishing year or season.

The overall project objective was to develop, calibrate, and refine an integrated spatially explicit bioeconomic model of the California sea urchin fishery. The model was designed to gain some insights into how spatial management measures, primarily reserves, might impact both the biological and economic health of a fishery in general, as well as how spatial policies might impact the California sea urchin fishery, in particular. We were successful in meeting our primary objectives for this project, and we have a variety of new and interesting results that we are in the process of publishing and presenting in workshops. This project involved fieldwork, econometric and statistical estimation, and programming, calibration, and simulation with a newly developed integrated bioeconomic model.

Subsidies are widely criticized in fisheries management for promoting global fishing capacity growth and overharvesting. Scientists worldwide have thus called for a ban on "harmful" subsidies that artificially increase fishing profits, resulting in the recent agreement among members of the World Trade Organization to eliminate such subsidies. The argument for banning harmful subsidies relies on the assumption that fishing will be unprofitable after eliminating subsidies, incentivizing some fishermen to exit and others to refrain from entering. These arguments follow from open-access governance regimes where entry has driven profits to zero. Yet many modern-day fisheries are conducted under limited-access regimes that limit capacity and maintain economic profits, even without subsidies. In these settings, subsidy removal will reduce profits but perhaps without any discernable effect on capacity. Importantly, until now, there have been no empirical studies of subsidy reductions to inform us about their likely quantitative impacts. In this paper, we evaluate a policy reform that reduced fisheries subsidies in China. We find that China's subsidy reductions accelerated the rate at which fishermen retired their vessels, resulting in reduced fleet capacity, particularly among older and smaller vessels. Notably, the reduction of harmful subsidies was only partly responsible for reducing fleet capacity; an increase in vessel retirement subsidies was also a necessary driver of capacity reduction. Our study demonstrates that the efficacy of removing harmful subsidies depends on the policy environment in which removals occur. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]