A Global Ex-vessel Fish Price Database: Construction and Applications

Synopsis We describe the first effort at creating a global ex-vessel fish price database, which is required for understanding the economic behavior of participants in the world’s fisheries. We demonstrate potential applications of the database by linking it to a spatially defined catch database, which makes it possible to attach landed values to species in both time and space. This is the first database available publicly where interested members of the public, researchers and managers can easily find and access ex-vessel prices of the world’s major commercial fish species. Preliminary results indicate that the average real price of a number of species have declined between 1950 and 2002. The estimated landed value of fish globally, in year 2000 dollars, was about US$24 billion in 1950. It increased steadily to about US$90 billion in the early 1970s, reached a peak of US$100 billion at the end of the 1980s, and declined to about US$80 billion in 2000. The top 15 fishing countries cumulatively account for 79% of total real landed value, with Japan leading, even though the value of its landings has been declining.      

Evaluating Projects and Assessing Sustainable Development in Imperfect Economies

We are interested in three related questions:(1) How should accounting prices be estimated?(2) How should we evaluate policy change in animperfect economy? (3) How can we check whetherintergenerational well-being will be sustainedalong a projected economic programme? We do notpresume that the economy is convex, nor do weassume that the government optimizes on behalfof its citizens. We show that the same set ofaccounting prices should be used both forpolicy evaluation and for assessing whether ornot intergenerational welfare along a giveneconomic path will be sustained. We also showthat a comprehensive measure of wealth,computed in terms of the accounting prices, canbe used as an index for problems (2) and (3)above. The remainder of the paper is concernedwith rules for estimating the accounting pricesof several specific environmental naturalresources, transacted in a few well knowneconomic institutions.     

Open access,common property and scarcity rent in fisheries

Open access resources are frequently not managed efficiently, resulting in falling stock levels and a declining income for fishermen. In the late 1970's, the policy response to this problem was the implementation of 200-mile fishing zones, which enabled the European Union to formulate and implement the Common Fisheries Policy, aimed at (among other things) conservation and distribution of available stocks. In Germany, this shift from an open access regime towards a common property regime had favourable outcomes. The trend of falling prices was reversed. The conclusion was that intertemporal efficiency had increased as a result of (inter)governmental policy. Apparently, a wedge was formed between price and marginal harvesting costs, implying that scarcity rent had returned as a component of prices.     

Teams, Firms and the Evolution of Profit Seeking Behavior

Even as advances in information theory over the last quarter century have cast increasing doubt on the proposition that firms successfully maximize profits, the objective of profit maximization continues to be an axiomatic feature of the neoclassical theory of the firm. This paper attempts to improve our understanding firms by treating the objective function as an open question. Specifically, an ontogenetic thought experiment is undertaken to address the question of what differentiates production teams from firms by asking why team members would sell their control rights to a principal, thereby transforming the team into a firm. What results is an account of the emergence of the objective of profit seeking. Profit seeking emerges endogenously as a more fit alternative than the objective of value maximization, which is less capable of coping with uncertainty through purposive adaptation.     

Trade and Renewable Resources in a Second Best World: An Overview

We provide an overview and introduction to the emerging field of trade and renewable resources, and discuss the potential impact of trade liberalization on welfare and resource conservation. A key factor determining the effect of trade reform is the institutional context or property rights regime, and our survey is organized such that it loosely follows the development of new insights with respect to institutions in this literature. This implies a transition from the benevolent planners model to the polar opposite benchmark of open access in the 1990s. Currently the pendulum is swinging back towards management and regulation, but institutions are treated as endogenous. We discuss and compare various key models in some detail and search for common ground between protagonists and antagonists of free trade. Paper based on Keynote address by Erwin Bulte, 12th Annual Conference of the European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, Bilbao (Spain), June 28–30, 2003.     

Competition and Regulation in Franchise Bidding

In this work we show that the separation property identified in the franchise bidding literature depends strictly on the hypothesis of coincidence of the regulator's beliefs with those of the competing firms. Nevertheless, in many contexts it is more truthful to hypothesize that the regulator's information is vaguer than that of the producers, so we introduce the possibility that the regulator is dealing with a double informational asymmetry as compared to the firms. In this case, the separation property is no longer valid, and the optimal tariff becomes a decreasing function of the degree of competition exercised during the auction.     

末位淘汰——管理中的一柄“双刃剑”

末位淘汰作为一种管理手段在企业界被广泛采用,在实践中具有优缺点,实施末位淘汰要根据企业的实际情况,选择一个部门或几个部门进行。同时要注重培育良好的绩效文化,让刚性的末位淘汰变得充“满柔性”以有利于末位淘汰制的实施。     

对禁止风景旅游区整体租赁的几点看法

在当前对风景旅游区的产权制度改革中,整体租赁模式运用广泛但争议颇大。本文运用产权理论和旅游相关理论,通过对风景名胜区整体租赁模式的分析,对建设部“禁止风景旅游区整体租赁”的规定提出了几点看法,希望能给我国风景旅游区的制度改革提供参考。     

我国经济体制改革的回顾与展望

我国经济体制改革已有28个年头,取得了四大成就:一是市场经济引进多元化竞争;二是经济高速增长;三是人民生活水平普遍提高;四是中国的国际影响力和竞争力在提升.我国在深化改革中面临诸多的体制性障碍和结构性矛盾,可归纳为四大滞后:一是政府职能转变滞后;二是产权制度改革滞后;三是配套改革滞后;四是经济增长方式的改革滞后.我们要清楚地认识当前的形势,解放思想,坚定信心,做深化改革的促进派.     

Sharing a River

A group of agents located along a river have quasi-linear preferences over water and money. We ask how the water should be allocated and what money transfers should be performed. The core lower bounds require that no coalition should get less than the welfare it could achieve by using the water it controls. The aspiration upper bounds demand that no coalition enjoy a welfare higher than what it could achieve in the absence of the remaining agents. Exactly one welfare distribution satisfies the core lower bounds and the aspiration upper bounds: it is the marginal contribution vector corresponding to the ordering of the agents along the river. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: D62, C71.