| dc.description.abstract | National jurisdiction over the fishery resources within the Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs) can be seen as an opportunity to overcome the problem of open access within the EEZs, but not on the high seas. Traditionally, it has been everybody's right to exploit the resources there. This right is now possibly under threat, cf. the UN Fish Stocks Agreement; however, it is still very much a juridical twilight zone. On the high seas, to some degree at least, open access is still the rule rather than the exception. Moreover, agreements between nations have to be based on voluntary cooperation, because there is no mechanism forcing nations to agree to something that would not be in their own interests. Therefore, this work is to a large degree about the possibility of overcoming the problem of open access through voluntary agreements.
The questions analysed in the thesis covers several topics relevant to the fisheries economics literature. First, exploitation of internationally shared fish stocks is considered under different assumptions about the regulatory regime, coalition formation, climatic conditions etc. In this part of the thesis, bioeconomic modelling and game theory are fundamental tools. Second, the production structure and capacity utilisation in a segment of a fishing fleet is analysed by means of duality theory and econometric methods. The span in topics and methods are perhaps large, but the topics have at least one important common feature; they are all related to the management of internationally shared fish stocks and the consequences of strategic behaviour. The aim of the thesis is thus to contribute to the understanding of the economic management of shared fishery resources. | en |
