Potential Benefits of a Transboundary Marine Protected Area Under no Cooperation Between Countries

There is a considerable amount of work done in transboundary fisheries and the implications of non-cooperative scenarios using game theory; there is also plenty of research about Marine Protected Areas (MPA) and their role on improving biomass, fishing yields and fishermen profits. However, there is still a lack of studies about the potential benefits of implementing (MPA) in order to alleviate biological and economic inefficiencies that result from competitive scenarios. We modified the benchmark model proposed by Levhari and Mirman (1980) in order to account for a transboundary fishery scenario under different movement patterns for a theoretic population over a spatial setting. By confining the stock between two Exclusive Economic Zones, we simulated two countries that differ in harvesting strategies and share equal proportions of the stock habitat.\ud \ud \ud \ud We found that MPAs have the potential to overcome both biological and economic inefficiencies in the fishery when the species movement is sufficiently high and the MPA is set in the optimal location. However, they can also have negative consequences when they are poorly designed or when the species movement is not high enough to generate significant spillover effects