Jean Boncoeur

Microeconomic Efficiencies and Macroeconomic Inefficiencies: On Sustainable Fisheries Policies in Very Poor Countries

Simple macro-models are used in a two good output spaces to show that, under certain conditions that occur in very poor countries, fisheries policies aimed at concentrating rent and rationalizing excess capacity may result in declines in economic growth. In cases where displaced labour has nowhere else to go, such policies may be welfare decreasing for the country as a whole. The second best policy in these cases would be to encourage open access fishing with controls on overall output. An example based upon information gathered on the shrimp fishery in Madagascar describes the relations between the relative price between artisanal and industrial fishing sectors, and differential effects of the leakage of rents through the net exports equation due to policies favouring capacity rationalization.

Marine Protected Areas: SOCIO-ECONOMY – Assessing the impact of marine protected areas on society's well-being: an economic perspective

Introduction From an economic point of view, marine protected areas (MPAs) may be regarded as public investments in marine ecosystems conservation. As such, the basic question raised by their economic assessment is to determine how they modify societys well-being. During the twentieth century, two types of methodologies have been developed for assessing the impact of public investments on societys well-being (Benard, 1985): cost–benefit analysis (CBA) and multicriteria analysis (MCA). The major difference between these methodologies lies in the type of metrics used. While CBA relies on a single metric (money), MCA is multidimensional, taking into account variables that are expressed in various units (monetary, physical, qualitative,…). In this respect, MCA belongs to the same paradigm as indicators-based methods that have been recently developed for the monitoring of MPAs (e.g., Hockey and Branch, 1997; Pomeroy et al ., 2004; Ojeda-Martinez et al ., 2009). But the purpose of MCA, as well as of CBA, is not merely descriptive: these methodologies are intended to help decision-makers in the selection of public investment projects, which requires prioritization. In this respect, MCA is more complex than CBA since it uses variables that are, by nature, incommensurate. Several techniques have been developed to overcome this difficulty (e.g., Keeney and Raiffa, 1976; Roy, 1978; Saaty, 1980), but all of them retain an element of arbitrariness. As a result, CBA is usually considered by economists as the orthodox method for the evaluation of public investment projects.