Comparisons Of Two Catch-Quota Management Regimes

In recent years,the Chinese government has been committed to promoting the sustainable development of offshore-capture resources,focusing on strengthening conservation and restoration of fishery resources that have been destroyed or even depleted due to overfishing.The catch-quota management,as a widely-recommended regulation in common-pool resource management,has been in pilot in China for several years and is expected to be applied to regulating offshore-capture fishery in the near future.Thus,it is of great practical significance to study the potential effects of catchquota limit policy under Chinese unique fishing environment.This paper tries to investigate the effects of different catch-quota management regimes on fishermen’s fishing strategies and social welfare through experiments which simulate a more practical fishing decision-making environment,close to the real decision-making environment for fishermen in China,with heterogeneity in fishermen’s fishing capacity and uncertainty in fish stock recruitment.Undergraduate students and experienced fishermen are randomly recruited as subjects for lab experiments and lab-in-the-field experiments respectively.The main results from the experimental data collected are as follows.Firstly,compared with the CP policy,the IQ policy leads to a more stable fish supply,a higher fish price and in turn,higher resource utilization efficiency.Moreover,the IQ policy can also maintain a reasonable profit level for those with low harvest capacity.Secondly,havest heterogeneity will induce a income gap,especially under CP policy.Thirdly,uncertainty can make it more difficult for subjects to evenly distribute the quota over the year.Fourthly,in reality,the preference of fishermen for the catch quota management regimes may be affected by their fishing patterns.