The Impact of Extended Fishery Jurisdiction on the New England Otter Trawl Fleet

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Abstract
During enactment of the Fisheries Conservation and Management Act (MFCMA) of 1976 it was widely anticipated that extension of fishery jurisdiction to 200 miles by the United States would result in substantial economic benefit to the domestic fishing industry. The traditional analyses of exploited fisheries show that in the absence of controls on entry into the domestic fishery, exclusion of foreign fleets will only yield temporary economic rents which will eventually be dissipated by additional domestic fishing effort. This paper examines post-MFCMA trends for the New England Otter Trawl fleet to determine the extent to which this hypothesis holds. By using a simulation program for this fishery, revenues and costs for representative vessels from four major New England ports from 1976 to 1982 were calculated and factor rents to owners, captains, and crew were estimated. For three of the four ports considered, the estimated real economic surplus for the typical vessel peaked in 1977-1978 and declined dramatically through 1982. While this finding indicates that some of the potential rents from the fishery may have been dissipated by a substantial increase in fleet size, other indicators show that this decline in economic surplus may have been due to exogenous factors and not rent dissipation as predicted by standard models.

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