Will a catch share for whales improve social welfare?
Abstract
We critique a proposal to use catch shares to manage transboundary wildlife resources
with potentially high non-extractive values, and we focus on the case of whales. Because
whales are impure public goods, a policy that fails to capture all nonmarket benefits
(due to free riding) could lead to a suboptimal outcome. Even if free riding were
overcome, whale shares would face four implementation challenges. First, a whale share
could legitimize the international trade in whale meat and expand the whale meat market.
Second, a legal whale trade creates monitoring and enforcement challenges similar
to those of organizations that manage highly migratory species such as tuna. Third,
a whale share could create a new political economy of management that changes incentives
and increases costs for nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to achieve the current
level of conservation. Fourth, a whale share program creates new logistical challenges
for quota definition and allocation regardless of whether the market for whale products
expands or contracts. Each of these issues, if left unaddressed, could result in lower
overall welfare for society than under the status quo.
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https://hdl.handle.net/10161/13518Collections
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Show full item recordScholars@Duke
Lori Snyder Bennear
Professor of Environmental Economics and Policy
My research focuses on evaluating environmental policies and improving methods and
techniques for conducting these evaluations. While the field of policy evaluation
is a broad one, my specific niche is in bringing rigorous quantitative methods to
evaluate environmental policy innovations along four dimensions. (1) Evaluating the
effectiveness of environmental policies and programs. This line of research uses statistical
analysis to estimate the extent to which environmenta
Andrew J Read
Stephen A. Toth Distinguished Professor of Marine Biology in the Nicholas School of
the Environment
I study the conservation biology of long-lived marine vertebrates, particularly marine
mammals, seabirds and sea turtles. My work, and that of my students, documents the
effects of human activities on populations of these species. Our work involves field
work, experimentation and modeling. I am particularly interested in the development
and application of new conservation tools.
Martin D. Smith
George M. Woodwell Distinguished Professor of Environmental Economics
Smith studies the economics of the oceans, including fisheries, marine ecosystems,
seafood markets, and coastal climate adaptation. He has written on a range of policy-relevant
topics, including economics of marine reserves, seasonal closures in fisheries, ecosystem-based
management, catch shares, nutrient pollution, aquaculture, genetically modified foods,
the global seafood trade, organic agriculture, coastal property markets, and coastal
responses to climate change. He is best known for id
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