Fishing Skill in Developing Country Fisheries: The Kedah, Malaysia Trawl Fishery

Abstract

The question arises for fishery managers as to whether or not there are observable and measurable attributes of the skipper or vessel that fishery managers can monitor and possibly regulate to control expansions in fishing capacity from this source. This paper addresses this neglected issue of resource management through a case study of the trawler fishery in the state of Kedah in Peninsular Malaysia. In the Kedah trawl fishery, skipper characteristics other than ethnicity did not significantly affect technical efficiency and skipper skill. Hence, there does not appear to be any readily observable characteristics pertaining to skipper skill to monitor and regulate. This finding militates against regulating skipper skill to control expansions in fishing capacity that can happen under license limitation. The results indicate that a skipper training program for the least efficient skippers may be called for to meet the objectives of equity and fairness as expressed in the New Economic Policy and its successor, the New Development Plan. Such a training program would also be consistent with one of the initial aims of the license limitation program, which was to promote equity among all ethnic groups in Malaysian society.

Economic performance of open-access offshore fisheries—The case of Vietnamese longliners in the South China Sea

“…This means that some vessels use a little more labour than the level that maximizes annual gross revenue of the vessel. Viswanathan et al (2002) also found this in the case of the Malaysia trawl fishery. A possible explanation is the abundant labour force in developing countries such as Vietnam.…”

Regulation of fisheries bycatch with common-pool output quotas

“…From the vantage of the entire fishery, the marginal benefits from cutting back on harvest-the ARTICLE IN PRESS 9 This technical description has an analogous relationship to the prototypical model of the polluting firm [5]. Note, as well, that by presuming a homogeneous technology for all fishermen, we are ignoring real-world variations in the production technologies of fishermen [10,20,24]. Alterations to accommodate such variations are relatively straightforward for the case of a discrete number of efficiency classes.…”

Estimating Heterogeneous Capacity and Capacity Utilization in a Multi-Species Fishery

“…1 Currently, there are two primary methods used to estimate fishery production technologies: data envelope analysis (DEA) [21,19,30] and stochastic production frontier (SPF) models [31,10,39,15,22]. DEA does not assume a parametric form for the production technology and is therefore a more general and flexible model.…”