The Pacific halibut fishery : success and failure under regulation, 1930-1960: the Canadian experience
Bibliographic record
Abstract
At the 1996 World Fisheries Congress, Donald A. McCaughran declared seventyfive years of regulatory success for the International Pacific Halibut Commission. The Commission's mandate was to reverse the precipitous decline in halibut stocks that had become apparent in the 1910's, and save this fishery from economic extinction. The biologists and fishermen who sat on the Commission assumed that the appropriate biological target was the one that yielded the maximum sustainable harvest. Using a bioeconomic model of the fishery and regression analysis, I argue the Commission's use of global quotas to achieve its biological goal of maximum sustained yield was most certainly an economic failure. I also argue its policies were very likely a biological failure, as well. While arguably accomplishing its biological goal of the maximum sustainable yield in 1960, dynamic bioeconomic theory indicates their policies probably destabilized the biological fishery. The paper will first sketch the historical background of the industry. Then the regulatory history will be discussed. Then the economic literature will be reviewed as it applies to the Pacific halibut industry. Finally, the historical data will be examined and the proposition that the regulatory management of the halibut fishery was a success will be tested. The period 1928 to 1960 is covered as it provides both reliable data and a continuous period of regulation, at the end of which the biological goal of maximum sustainable yields was apparently achieved. In conclusion, I find that statistically the fishermen were insensitive to the direct effects of the quota and the total quantity of fish available, and instead responded to the quota's indirect effects on the fishermen's costs, which induced the inflow of greater fishing capital than otherwise would have occurred.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".