On July 1st PhD Jorge Dresdner and co-authors Julio Peña-Torres, Felipe Quezada and Iván Luzardo were honoured as the winners for the 2020 Outstanding Article in Marine Resource Economics. Their article titled “Collective Share Quotas and the Role of Fishermen’s Organizations in Ex-Vessel Price Determination” was chosen by a vote of the journal’s associate editors.
The wining article examines the collective bargaining efforts of atomized fishermen with a monopsony-like buying sector. The existence of cooperative fishermen’s bargaining associations and a highly concentrated processing sector is a result from governmental allocation of collective share quotas. Consequently, the processing sector started behaving as a countervailing monopsony and it drove ex-vessel price determination into region-specific bilateral monopoly price bargaining. The authors estimate an empirical model of regional ex-vessel price determination, taking advantage of between-region regulatory differences to identify the differential effects on ex-vessel prices. Besides, they estimate the overall impact on regional ex-vessel prices from this process of institutional change. Their results show evidence of higher, policy-shift driven, ex-vessel prices at only one of the regions studied.
Editor-in-Chief Joshua Abbott notes:
"Fishers in small-scale and artisanal fisheries around the world often struggle to achieve collective action to effectively regulate and coordinate their harvest activities to achieve sustainable and profitable fisheries. This same lack of coordination also frequently places them in a weak bargaining position relative to the more concentrated, better-organized buyers or processors that purchase it. Through careful examination of regional price time series, the authors show that thoughtfully designed policies that vest shares of the resource in community fisher organizations can improve resource management outcomes, while also enhancing the bargaining position of fishers in selling their catch. It is my hope that this work will encourage more empirical research on the effective design of management reforms for artisanal fisheries." (Click here for more information).
The winners will each receive an award certificate and engraved recognition on the perpetual award plaque housed in the School of Sustainability, Arizona State University. To have access to this article, please click here.