Trading Off Tourism for Fisheries

This paper presents a deterministic bioeconomic model in which the creation of a marine protected area (MPA) is not only a fisheries management tool but also introduced in order to provide tourism amenity benefits. The theoretical model is illustrated with analysis of the Nha Trang Bay (NTB) MPA in Khanh Hoa province in Vietnam, where the anchovy purse seine fishery is considered. An amenity value function of the NTB MPA is estimated from a discrete choice experiment among national tourists. A weighting parameter is added to the bioeconomic model to allow the establishment of a tradeoff between management preferences regarding the two sectors affected by the MPA, fisheries and tourism. Both the theoretical models and the empirical application show how the added amenity values affect optimal fishing practices as well as the identification of the optimal MPA size. Our applied analysis shows that contrary to the argument in most MPA studies with multiple stakeholders, the current management practice in Khanh Hoa prioritizes the fisheries sector heavily compared to tourism, despite high economic cost.