Loss of economic rents in the global fishery

Most of the world’s ocean fisheries are severely lacking in private property rights in the underlying natural resources or their close complements (e.g. harvesting volume). Therefore, according to standard property rights theory, these fisheries should be highly wasteful of potential economic rents from these resources. The question is whether this economic loss can be empirically verified and, if so, how large it is. This paper explains the concept and develops the analytical theory of economic and natural rents. Building on this and utilizing global fisheries data, the paper proceeds to estimate a global fisheries model, obtain numerical estimates of the rent loss in the world’s ocean capture fisheries and provide reasonable confidence bounds for this loss. It is found that the global fisheries rent loss constitutes almost certainly a large fraction of the landed value of the global landings. The mean estimate of this loss is well over 50% of the value of landings.