Transaction Costs Of The Itq System In The Marine Fisheries Resource Management Study

With the development of fisheries economy, marine fisheries resources have been declining since 1970s' in China. Series of management countermeasures, such as fishing permits, have been adopted to protect marine fisheries resources, but this trend of declining has not been changed. So fishing quota system was put forward in Fishing Law of the People's Republic of China, which was amended on October 31, 2000. As a kind of fishing quota system, individual transferable quota (ITQ) system was suggested in 1973 for the first time, and was immediately adopted by many countries since then. Experiences from some counties proved that it is able to correct the over fishing behaviors and to protect marine fisheries resources. Some Economists applauded for it as the most efficient fishing quota system, but some other economists argued that its high transaction costs could cause losses in its efficiency. Studies concentrated on its transaction costs are scarce both domestically and internationally.This thesis explored the influence of transaction costs of ITQ system on its efficiency, the classification of its transaction costs, factors which affect its transaction costs in Chinese situation, and countermeasures can be adopted to cut down its transaction costs in China.The author proved that although ITQ system is more efficient than the traditional systems which were used to protect marine fisheries resources, its transaction costs can distort the total allowable catch, the distribution of individual transferable quotas, and the transaction of ITQ, this kind of distortion can cause losses in its efficiency, and the endogenous transaction costs which are brought forth by the supervision problem increase with the number of fishermen.If the transaction costs of individual transferable quota system in China are studied from Williamson's viewpoint, one can find that this system can be mostly used in large fisheries area(such as Zhou Shan and Sheng Si), and that because of the large uncertainty and intense investment idiosyncrasy of Chinese fisheries, the transaction costs of this system will be very high.If one analyze the transaction costs of individual transferable quota system in China from the characteristics of Chinese fisheries, fishing communities, and fishermen, he will find that such institutions as fishing objective permits, fishing method permits, limit on net size, and check on the young fish component of catches are compatible with ITQ system, and so can reduce the transaction costs of it, but there are lots of fishermen and fishing boats in China, the cultural qualities, institutional awareness, and technology of fishermen are low, the costs of transferring fishermen to other industries are high, the shore of Chinese oceans is long, the areas of these oceans are broad, the frequency of transaction in ocean is high, multi-catches often occur in fisheries in China, so the transaction costs of ITQ system in China will be very high., especially the costs of quota distribution and supervision costs existing after the distribution. Additionally, under current economic system of fisheries and administrative system of fishing community, fishermen are weakly organized, which will increase the quota distribution costs and supervision costs of ITQ system.As for a country with multi-catch fisheries and so many fishermen, China has to bear high supervision costs if she completely depends on fisheries administrative department to carry out ITQ system. "Social embeddedness" of the trust relationship between familiars and reputation effects, and the substitution between trust and supervision can be proved to exist in fishing communities and fisheries in China by developing and tailoring the Barro's model of game theory in financing field to the reality of Chinese fisheries. Quota cooperative team can also be proved to be helpful to reduce the supervision costs of ITQ system in multi-catch fisheries by extending Itoh's principal-agent model to multi-catch fisheries in China.On the basis of these perspectives stated above, the author pointed out that because such fishing community...