Browsing by Author "Asche, F"

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    Economic incentives to target species and fish size: Prices and fine-scale product attributes in Norwegian fisheries
    (ICES Journal of Marine Science, 2015-08-19) Asche, F; Chen, Y; Smith, MD
    © International Council for the Exploration of the Sea 2014. All rights reserved.Improved fisheries management provides fishers with more opportunities to maximize harvest value by accounting for valuable attributes of the harvest such as species, harvest timing, fish size, product form, and landing location. Harvest values can also vary by vessel and gear type. Moreover, the extent of targeting can influence the ecosystem in which the fishers operate and provide important management challenges.Weutilize a unique dataset containing daily vessel-level fish landings in one region of Norway in 2010 to investigate the value of an array of attributes, including species, product form, product condition, timing, fish size, vessel type, gear type, and landing location for cod and other whitefish species, aswell as king crab. Wealso investigate to what extent landed value differs across different communities, firms, and plants. The results indicate substantial variation for all attributes, highlighting opportunities for fishers aswell as potential management challenges. For whitefish, the species landed accounts for threequarters of the variation in prices. For cod in particular, the fish size accounts for nearly all variation in prices. In these fisheries, market conditions justify management focus on the biological composition of the catch.
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    Fair Enough? Food Security and the International Trade of Seafood
    (World Development, 2015-03-01) Asche, F; Bellemare, MF; Roheim, C; Smith, MD; Tveteras, S
    © 2014 Elsevier Ltd.Does international trade make all parties better off? We study the relationship between food security and the international trade of fish and seafood between developing and developed countries. Specifically, we look at and discuss the evolution of trade flows - values, quantities, and prices - between developing and developed countries. The picture that emerges suggests that the quantity of seafood exported from developing countries to developed countries is close to the quantity of seafood imported by developing countries from developed countries. What takes place is a quality exchange: developing countries export high-quality seafood in exchange for lower quality seafood.
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    Markets, Trade and Seafood
    (Encyclopedia of Natural Resources - Two-Volume Set (Print), 2014-07-23) Smith, MD; Asche, F; Roheim, C
    This entry describes the growth in seafood production and trade and the main factors causing these developments. We then review the leading economic research on the international seafood trade and markets with a focus on interactions of markets and the management of fisheries and aquaculture. Specific examples include the relationship between fisheries management institutions and international trade; the relationship between the value of seafood attributes and production practices; and the development of the Fish Price Index (FPI) by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) to address food security concerns.
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    Pricing of eco-labels with retailer heterogeneity
    (Food Policy, 2015-01-01) Asche, F; Larsen, TA; Smith, MD; Sogn-Grundvåg, G; Young, JA
    © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.Eco-labels are important features of many natural resource and food markets. They certify that a product has some desirable unobserved quality, typically related to a public good such as being sustainably produced. Two issues that have received limited attention are whether pricing varies across different eco-labels that may compete with each other and to what extent different retailers charge different prices. Using a unique data set of salmon prices in eight different United Kingdom retail chains, we investigate these issues by estimating a price-attribute model that includes two eco-labels and one country-of-origin label. Results show substantial variation in the prices of the different eco-labels and that eco-label premiums vary across retail chains. Specifically, salmon certified with the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) label has a high premium in low-end retail chains but no statistically significant premium in the high-end chains. These findings question the ability of the MSC label to transmit consumer willingness-to-pay for public goods through the supply chain to incentivize sustainable management. In contrast, premiums for organic certification are similar in magnitude across retailer types. In general, failure to account for retailer heterogeneity will over- or under-estimate a label's premium.
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    Spatial-dynamics of hypoxia and fisheries: The case of Gulf of Mexico brown shrimp
    (Marine Resource Economics, 2014-01-01) Smith, MD; Asche, F; Bennear, LS; Oglend, A
    © 2014 MRE foundation, Inc. All rights reserved.We analyze the Gulf of Mexico brown shrimp fishery and the potential impacts of a large seasonal area of hypoxia (low dissolved oxygen) that coincides with the peak shrimp season. A spatial-dynamic bioeconomic simulation embeds three biological impacts on shrimp: mortality, growth, and aggregation on hypoxic edges. Hypoxia creates feedbacks in the bioeconomic system, altering catch and effort patterns. System changes propagate over space to affect areas that do not experience hypoxia. Areas that might otherwise be considered controls in a natural experiments framework are contaminated by the ecological disturbance through spatial sorting. Aggregate predictions from simulations are similar to empirical fishery data. Average shrimp size and total landings are negatively correlated, as are hypoxic severity and landings. Shrimp size and hypoxic severity are only weakly negatively correlated. Growth overfishing, which varies with recruitment success and ecological disturbances, is a key mediating effect.
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    Trade intervention: Not a silver bullet to address environmental externalities in global aquaculture
    (Marine Policy, 2016-07-01) Asche, F; Roheim, CA; Smith, MD
    © 2015 Elsevier LtdAquaculture has been the world's fastest growing food production technology in recent decades, and continued growth in aquaculture production is predicted. While creating economic opportunity, aquaculture is also a new way of using eco-systems, and there is substantial evidence that aquaculture creates negative environmental externalities. Although the most effective way to address these externalities may be improved governance, this approach is often difficult because most aquaculture production takes place in developing countries with limited management capacity. The fact that a large part of aquaculture production is traded motivates substantial interest in the use of trade measures to reduce environmental impacts. However, the wide variety of species, production practices, and governance systems present in aquaculture makes it unlikely that general trade measures will achieve environmental objectives. Rather, there is a real risk that trade measures will reduce economic opportunity, raise new equity concerns, and impinge on public health with little or no environmental impact.
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    U.S. shrimp market integration
    (Marine Resource Economics, 2012-06-25) Asche, F; Bennear, LS; Oglend, A; Smith, MD
    Recent supply shocks in the Gulf of Mexico-including hurricanes, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and the seasonal appearance of a large dead zone of low oxygen water (hypoxia)-have raised concerns about the economic viability of the U.S. shrimp fishery. The ability of U.S. shrimpers to mediate supply shocks through increased prices hinges on the degree of market integration, both among shrimp of different sizes classes and between U.S. wild caught shrimp and imported farmed shrimp. We use detailed data on shrimp prices by size class and import prices to conduct a co-integration analysis of market integration in the shrimp industry. We find significant evidence of market integration, suggesting that the law of one price holds for this industry. Hence, in the face of a supply shocks, prices do not rise; instead, imports of foreign farmed fish increase.