Commercial fisheries management: the New England groundfish experience.

Experience in New England fisheries has shown that where a stock cannot support unrestricted fishing, regulations always have implicit distributional implications. However when the competing user groups participate in the management process, only those regulations with the most indirect distributional implications are accepted. Quota systems, because they are single-species oriented and because they make no explicit allocations among users, provide incentives for inefficient use and overexploitation. Besides encouraging discarding at sea and false reporting, they have lead to increased effort and substantial new entry on regulated species in New England fisheries. Multispecies management appears necessary where fisheries are economically interdependent. Tax/subsidy or licensing schemes are unavoidable in providing proper incentives through explicit allocation of rights among users.