Search Results for: fisheries

Saving Fisheries with Property Rights

Lynne Kiesling Researchers at PERC have been working on free-market environmentalism and property rights-based approaches to aligning economic and environmental values for decades. This video does an excellent job of highlighting the work that PERC scholars and others have done to make ocean fisheries more sustainable by moving from open-access overfishing to population and profit …

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Overfishing and the Impending Collapse of Fisheries

Lynne Kiesling Why is it so difficult, in terms of politics and transaction costs, to define and enforce property rights in fish? If we fail to do so, some important fish species are likely to go extinct due to overfishing, such as the bluefin tuna. Migratory fish like the bluefin pose the biggest policy challenges, …

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Fisheries In The News

There’s been a lot of discussion and analysis lately of fisheries and fishery policy. In many ways fisheries represent the quintessential “tragedy of the commons” (or what I prefer to call “tragedy of open access”) because treating fish populations as an open access resource has led to overfishing of many species as human populations have …

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BBC News: World’s Fishing Fleets Mapped from Orbit

This BBC article on big data and fisheries is fascinating. Using satellite photography, researchers have mapped all of the world’s fisheries by area, finding that fishery area is larger than arable acreage while providing less than 2% of all calories consumed. I also found the conclusion thought-provoking that the patterns reveal larger effects from politics …

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Jonathan Adler on Common-pool Resources

Lynne Kiesling Case Western law professor Jonathan Adler (someone to whom I link frequently here) is guest blogging for Megan McArdle at the Atlantic right now, and he’s sharing some valuable insights from his research in environmental and administrative law. His first post lays a foundation by summarizing and analyzing Garrett Hardin’s seminal “tragedy of …

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Overfishing Conference at Perc

Lynne Kiesling Jonathan Adler reports from a PERC workshop on fisheries management and how property rights institutions can reduce pervasive overfishing problems in fishing. Overfishing is a serious environmental and economic problem, and Jon provides excellent links to the body of research showing that property rights institutions, such as tradeable catch shares, can reduce overfishing …

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Vincent and Elinor Ostrom and Public Ownership of Natural Resources

Michael Giberson Among the news stories in response to Elinor Ostrom’s sharing of the Nobel prize for economics, an article from Alaska which mentions the important role played by Vincent Ostrom in the development of that state’s treatment of natural resources.  Both Ostroms worked on related ideas and management of natural resources was central to …

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Walmart’s Increasingly Green Supply Chain

Lynne Kiesling One of the most fascinating cases in environmental economics and business is Walmart. Over the past five years, Walmart has turned their famous supply-chain management sights on reducing the environmental impact of the products they sell while still keeping their costs, and therefore retail prices, as low as before. This Fortune magazine article …

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