STOCK AND (POSSIBLY) PATH DEPENDENT TECHNOLOGIES

According to conventional economic wisdom the economically more efficient technology will always outcompete the less efficient. This hypothesis has usually been taken to hold for the exploitation of common pool renewable natural resources such as fish stocks. This paper claims that, while this is not necessarily false, it may be too optimistic. The paper shows that what constitutes the most efficient technology may switch depending on biomass size. It also shows that once effective fisheries management is introduced and biomass recovers, a return to the initially most efficient technology may not be possible because of its embeddedness in traditional knowledge and institutions which might have become forgotten or lost. Thus, there may be a degree of technological irreversibilty in fisheries and other natural reource utilization. The paper’s findings seem relevant to many situations in developing countries fisheries where labour-intensive technologies are displaced by more capital-intensive technologies, often introduced with government subsidies. The uncontrolled expansion of the latter then creates the condition, i.e. reduced stock sizes, especially in inshore areas, that disadvantages the intially more efficient labour-intensive technologies