International Fish Wars: The Strategic Roles for Fleet Licensing and Effort Subsidies

This article examines the problem of noncooperative international fishing by analyzing the strategic rent-shifting roles for such well-known national management policies as fleet licensing and effort subsidies. It is shown that the noncooperative equilibrium in each policy takes the form of a prisonerʹs dilemma with dissipated rents in the fishery. It is also shown that strategic effort subsidies can only lead to incomplete rent dissipation but strategic fleet licensing can lead to complete rent dissipation. The models developed in this article may help to provide an explanation for the persistence of large and excessively subsidized national fleets that exploit depleted international fish stocks.