Fisheries economics: cutting a broad swath in the field of scientific inquiry

The study of fisheries is the common theme running through the six papers in this special issue. For many years, this has been of interest to academics, government legislators and regulators alike. If we cast our sights back almost one hundred years, Warming’s (1911) seminal article investigated the issue of resource rents from the exploitation of fisheries. Moving forward forty years Gordon (1954) and Scott (1955) set in place static and dynamic frameworks, respectively, for better understanding the motivations that underlay behavioural choices of fishers under conditions of both open access and sole ownership. Their papers highlighted the potential usefulness of integrating two fields of study: fisheries biology and economic optimization. Bio-economic modeling became the workhorse of the 1970s–1980s. Clark (1983) laid out the formal circumstances under which overexploitation, rent dissipation, and the potential for species extinction might arise while Clark and Munro (1975) pushed the boundaries even further by examining the linkage between fish stock dynamics and capital theory. On the management side, Moloney and Pearse (1979) proposed that fisheries managers adopt the use of individual transferable quotas (ITQs) as a way of discouraging the race-for-fish mentality that had developed with the introduction of limited entry, itself designed to deal with the excesses of open access. Squires’s (1987) use of duality theory promoted a better understanding the micro-econometric foundations of fishing behaviour and spawned a large and expanding empirical literature that produced estimates of the value of rent dissipation in suboptimally managed fisheries (Dupont 1990) and laid the foundations for measuring capacity utilization and excess capacity (Dupont et al. 2002). More computing power was aligned with dynamic optimization models (Bjørndal 1988) and allowed researchers to examine behaviour of not just the representative fisher but also to incorporate both heterogeneity and spatial considerations into the analysis (Sanchirico and Wilen 1999; Smith 2000). The six papers in this issue all further our understanding of the economics of the fishery and they reveal the breadth of scientific inquiry that we have come to expect from this literature. Increasingly, the study of the interrelationships among marine species, their habitats, and their human exploiters draws upon not just economic and biological models, but is also informed by literature from fields as diverse as the study of legal/regulatory systems and psychological models underlying risk-taking in uncertain environments. The