Growth Overfishing

Growth overfishing squanders large parts of the potential rents in fisheries. Many of today’s fisheries are\ud characterized by a severely truncated age-distribution, which in addition may have irreversible ecological\ud consequences. Nevertheless, the implications of age-differentiated harvesting for management have\ud received surprisingly little attention in the literature. In the present paper, optimal and non-cooperative\ud exploitation paths for a generic age-distributed resource are derived. We show that, in the case of perfect\ud selectivity, competition between two agents is sufficient to dissipate all rents. Akin to the classical\ud Bertrand competition in prices, each agent has an incentive to target fish at a younger age. That is, the\ud “race to fish” extends to the dimension of age. This observation is crucial also with respect to management:\ud Individual quotas are not able to restore efficiency unless accompanied by gear regulation.\ud Moreover, it turns out that quotas specified in terms of numbers are far superior to those specified in\ud terms of volume or value