Analysis of Open-Access Commercial Exploitation and Maximum Economic Yield in Biologically and Technologically Interdependent Fisheries

Abstract

Fisheries may be interdependent because of biological relationships that exist between their stocks or because the gear of one affects mortality in the stock of the other. The problems of defining a maximum sustainable yield in these cases are discussed. A graphical analysis is used to describe the combinations of effort from both fisheries where concurrent exploitation is possible and which of these combinations will result in a simultaneous equilibrium. Finally the conditions for a combined maximum economic yield (MEY) are presented and it is shown that they will not hold if each fishery is managed to obtain an individual MEY.