Economic Evaluation of Recreational Fishery Policies (original) (raw)

Recreational fi sheries around the world provide humans with important economic benefi ts because people derive well-being from participating in the act of fi shing. Many of these benefi ts are diffi cult to value, however, because they are nonmarket in nature and depend on 'free' ecological services. Other sectors of society may also depend on these public goods. It is diffi cult to exclude people from using public goods and there is, therefore, a tendency for them to be under-produced by the private sector. Thus, there is often a need for government policy intervention to ensure the adequate production of public ecological services and resolve confl icts over their use. Policies that affect recreational fi sheries have costs and benefi ts, both for anglers and people in other sectors of society, that must be accounted for if social well-being is to be maximised. Economics can be used to quantify the costs and benefi ts of various policy options available to society, and make recommendations that improve overall economic effi ciency. Overall well-being (welfare) consists of the sum of 'surpluses' accruing to producers and consumers. In this chapter, we outline the principles of economic cost-benefi t analysis of market and nonmarket values for recreational fi sheries using examples from various jurisdictions. We also consider how economic analysis can be used to account for the transaction costs of fi sheries management -costs often borne by society as a whole -for different forms of governance.