Estimating Fishing Vessel Capacity: A Comparison of Nonparametric Frontier Approaches

Abstract

Fishing capacity has been an important national and international topic for over a decade. Led by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), an international effort was undertaken in 1998 to define and measure fishing capacity, during which three methods to measure fishing capacity were identified–data envelopment analysis (DEA), stochastic production frontiers (SPF), and the peak-to-peak approach. Most estimates of capacity have been carried out using DEA. This study introduces “order-m” frontiers and the free disposal hull (FDH) as additional methods to estimate fishing capacity, and compares capacity estimates for a group of fishing vessels based on the DEA, FDH, and order-m models. Our results show a large difference between capacity estimates using DEA when compared to the other two methods.