Generating Value in Habitat-Dependent Fisheries: The Importance of Fishery Management Institutions

Abstract

<i>This paper models dynamic producer and consumer benefits from improving habitat that supports the North Carolina blue crab fishery. It embeds two fishery management institutions—open access and partial rationalization—in a multispecies, two-patch spatial bioeconomic model with endogenous output price and estuarine eutrophication. Producer benefits from improved environmental quality are higher for the rationalized fishery than for open access. Consumer benefits are larger than producer benefits and are comparable across institutions. However, the total benefits from improving environmental quality are small relative to the benefits from rationalizing the fishery and leaving environmental quality the same.</i> (JEL Q22)