Enforcement and uncertainty in the management of joint fisheries

This paper seeks to study government’s regulation of fisheries (or other natural resources) in the presence of the following two characteristics: 1) The fishery is shared between different countries, so there is at least one other country also regulating the fishery. 2) There is some level of political risk regarding future decisions in both/all countries, which is recognized both by fishermen and governments. The main question we study is how this political risk should affect the government’s policy. We focus on two aspects of government policy; enforcement levels and political uncertainty in own country. Our main result is that uncertainty about enforcement levels in the other country affects the optimal behaviour for the government in our country. If the optimal enforcement level in our country is a concave function of the enforcement level in the other country, uncertainty about the policy in the other country should reduce the optimal enforcement level in our country, which also implies that it is optimal for our country to remove more uncertainty about our policy than it would otherwise be. Conversely, if the optimal enforcement level in our country is a convex function of the enforcement level in the other country, uncertainty about enforcement in the other country should increase the enforcement level in our country, and it would be optimal to maintain a higher level of uncertainty about our own policy than otherwise