Productivity and Management of Renewable Resources: Why More Efficient Fishing Fleets Should Fish Less

This article analyses the effect of productivity improvements on optimal fisheries management. It is shown that when harvest costs are independent of resource stock and the stock is below its steady state level, then for any given stock it is optimal to reduce harvest levels in response to a productivity increase unless optimal harvest rate is already zero. If harvest costs are stock dependent this result is modified; for stock dependent harvest costs there exists an interval of stock sizes below the steady state where it is optimal to reduce the harvest rate for any given stock size whereas if the harvest rate is close to an economically optimal steady state it is optimal to increase the harvest rate.

Low-Cost Strategies to Improve Municipal Solid Waste Management in Developing Countries: Experimental Evidence from Nepal

Many cities in developing countries lack adequate drainage and waste management infrastructure. Consequently, city residents face economic and health impacts from flooding and waterlogging, which are aggravated by solid waste infiltrating and blocking drains. City governments have recourse to two strategies to address these problems: a) ‘hard’ infrastructure-related interventions through investment in the expansion of drainage and waste transportation networks; and/or, b) ‘soft’, low-cost behavioural interventions that encourage city residents to change waste disposal practices. This research examines whether behavioural interventions, such as information and awareness raising alongside provision of inexpensive street waste bins, can improve waste management in the city. We undertook a cluster randomized controlled trial study in Bharatpur, Nepal, where one group of households was treated with a soft, low-cost intervention (information and street waste bins) while the control group of households did not receive the intervention. We econometrically compared baseline indicators – perceived neighbourhood cleanliness, household waste disposal methods, and at-source waste segregation – from a pre-intervention survey with data from two rounds of post-intervention surveys. Results from analysing household panel data indicate that the intervention increased neighbourhood cleanliness and motivated the treated households to dispose their waste properly through waste collectors. The intervention, however, did not increase household waste segregation at source, which is possibly because of municipal waste collectors mixing segregated and non-segregated waste during collection. At-source segregation, a pre-requisite for efficiently managing municipal solid waste, may improve if municipalities arrange to collect and manage degradable and non-degradable waste separately.

Distributional Issues in Natural Capital Accounting: An Application to Land Ownership and Ecosystem Services in Scotland

Accounting for ecosystems is increasingly central to natural capital accounting. What is missing from this, however, is an answer to questions about how natural capital is distributed. That is, who consumes ecosystem services and who owns or manages the underlying asset(s) that give rise to ecosystem services. In this paper, we examine the significance of the ownership of land on which ecosystem assets (or ecosystem types) is located in the context of natural capital accounting. We illustrate this in an empirical application to two ecosystem services and a range of ecosystem types and land ownership in Scotland, a context in which land reform debates are longstanding. Our results indicate the relative importance of private land in ecosystem service supply, rather than land held by the public sector. We find relative concentration of ownership for land providing comparatively high amounts of carbon sequestration. For air pollution removal, however, the role of smaller to medium sized, mostly privately owned, land holdings closer to urban settlements becomes more prominent. The contributions in this paper, we argue, represent important first steps in anticipating distributional impacts of natural capital (and related) policy in natural capital accounts as well as connecting these frameworks to broader concerns about wealth disparities across and within countries.

Managing Marine Mammals and Fisheries: A Calibrated Programming Model for the Seal-Fishery Interaction in Sweden

This paper develops a model based on the concept of Positive Mathematical Programming (PMP) that is useful for ex-ante analyses of how policy measures affect commercial fisheries. PMP models are frequently used in agriculture, but rarely for analyzing fisheries. Fisheries often face a large set of constraints such as effort regulations and catch quotas of which some might be binding and others not. An econometric approach is developed for calibrating models with both binding and non-binding constraints. The interaction between seals and Swedish fisheries is used as an empirical application. Seal interaction is modeled as seals predating fish from passive gear (nets and hooks), which is primarily an issue for the coastal fishery. The model contains 24 fleet segments involved in 247 different fishing activities in 2012. The results show that if no further management action is taken, fisheries using passive gear will reduce their activities from about 46 000 days at sea per year to about 41 000 and reducing their economic performance from losses of about 2 million Euros to about 3.3 million. The impact from seals can be reduced by reducing the seal population or providing economic compensation.