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Estimation and use of recreational fishing values in management decisions

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Abstract

In many countries, commercial and recreational fishing compete for access to marine resources. In some cases, recreational catch outweighs commercial harvest and may threaten species otherwise protected from commercial fishing. This has led to increasing calls for improved management of recreational fishing in the broader context of general fisheries management. As a result, fisheries managers face the challenge to decide how to allocate the available marine resources between competing uses. In this paper, we review and explain two common approaches that have been used to support recreational fishing allocation decisions. While economic activity analysis is an appropriate tool to assess how a change in resource allocation would affect regional economic activity (economic contributions and impacts), it is ill-suited to assess associated gains or losses in welfare of society as a whole (economic efficiency). Hence, economic activity analysis and social cost–benefit analysis complement each other, with each providing a different set of information answering a different set of questions. Unfortunately, both types of analysis use the term “economic value” suggesting that they are alternative approaches that provide the same information, whereas in fact they are not. If the objective of fishery managers is to ensure that society as a whole is made better off, the appropriate metric is economic value as defined by welfare economics. Under this definition, all goods and services provided by marine resources that are beneficial to humans have economic value. This includes non-use values such as the continued existence of an endangered marine species. The aim of this paper is to support managers and policymakers in allocating marine resources by reviewing relevant economic principles, concepts, and tools in the context of recreational fishing, including the use and challenges of estimating the non-market benefits generated by recreational fishing experiences.

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Notes

  1. Abbott et al. (2018) refer to the introduction of individually tradeable quotas for commercial recreational fishing (Abbott et al. 2009), and harvest tags and fishing days for private recreational fishers (Abbott 2015; Johnston et al. 2007).

  2. Recreational and commercial fishing additionally competes with other users (e.g. scuba-divers) and non-users (e.g. people who value the continued existence of threatened fish species). This paper focuses on commercial and recreational fishing, acknowledging that maximizing the economic efficiency of marine resource allocations would require the inclusion of all users and non-users enjoyed by society.

  3. This concept of economic value is not inconsistent with the concept of bounded rationality (Simon 1972), which suggests that individuals may make less than optimal decisions due to the complexity of assessing all options. In such cases, choice may be made on past behaviours or limited information, rather than on relative economic value per se.

  4. We note that perfectly competitive markets are stylised models used to outline generally accepted principles of microeconomic theory. For more details see, for example, Mas-Collel et al. (1995) and Frank (2014).

  5. In the short run, producer surplus differs from profit by fixed costs (Frank 2014).

  6. The term ‘non-market value’ refers to the benefit enjoyed from the fishing experience (generated through fish catch and fishing-site characteristics) and does not include, for example, producer surplus enjoyed by the recreational fishing industry.

  7. Recreational fishers may be indifferent between going fishing or spending their time in another activity if the cost of participation equals the benefit they gain. In fact, Ditton and Sutton (2004) found that many recreational fishers would be readily prepared to substitute to other recreational activities if fishing was not available.

  8. A ‘region’ can be defined at any scope and scale.

  9. The terms “impact” and “contribution” appear to be defined differently across studies. Watson et al. (2007) offer definitions and suggest differentiating between the two terms by the way substitution effects are treated: impact studies take substitution effects into account, whereas contribution studies do not.

  10. Revenue approximates output value (also called gross production value).

  11. As pointed out by an anonymous reviewer, expenditure attribution can be estimated by means of socio-economic surveys, which have been used, for example, in Australia for this purpose.

  12. This also holds for value-added generated by the commercial fishing industry. The surplus enjoyed by consumers of seafood are equally excluded from this metric.

  13. Some economic activity studies report consumer surplus and add it to expenditure to derive the total benefit gained by recreational fishers (e.g. McLeod and Lindner 2018).

  14. Estimating the economic value of charter fishing trips may also require the use of non-market valuation methods even though charter fishing is a service purchased within markets. The market may be too ‘thin’ to generate enough information for the estimation of consumer surplus.

  15. For more detailed information on these methods including their strengths and limitations we refer the interested reader to the references identified in the following sections.

  16. Benefit transfer can be a low-cost alternative to employing revealed and stated preference methods. Benefit transfer involves extrapolating existing empirical value estimates (typically derived using revealed and stated preference methods) and using them in similar situations and locations (e.g. Johnston et al. 2015). However, applying this method is not without its challenges and depends before all else on the availability of suitable value estimates.

  17. Some studies have combined multi-site travel cost models with discrete choice models to overcome this limitation (e.g. Whitehead and Lew 2020).

  18. Hedonic pricing uses market prices for goods and services and estimates, through regression analysis, the proportion of the market value associated with the goods and services’ individual characteristics (e.g. Hanley and Barbier 2009).

  19. The selection of the payment vehicles may affect choice behaviour and estimated willingness-to-pay (e.g. Oviedo et al. 2016; Talpur et al. 2018).

  20. Access may require a fishing licence, which may incur a seasonal, annual, or multi-annual fee.

  21. See, for example, McPhee and Hundloe (2004b) who provide a critical review of case studies and their role in influencing changes in the allocation of access to fisheries in Australia.

  22. As pointed out by an anonymous reviewer, it is important to note that the efficiency of resource allocations is a dynamic concept. For example, price fluctuations in commercial fish markets, introductions of new gear restrictions, or changes in the site-choice preferences of recreational fishers might change the relative value between commercial and recreational fishing. Minimising the resulting efficiency loss would then require an adjustment of the allocated resources across the two sectors.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the four anonymous reviewers for their useful comments.

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  1. Marine Resource Economics Team, CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere, Queensland Biosciences Precinct, 306 Carmody Road, Saint Lucia, 4067, Australia

    Gabriela Scheufele & Sean Pascoe

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Scheufele, G., Pascoe, S. Estimation and use of recreational fishing values in management decisions. Ambio 51, 1275–1286 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-021-01634-7

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