Resource rent in aquaculture (RRA) is any payment to a farm and site owner, on land or sea, in excess of the costs needed to bring that farm into production. For analytic and policy purposes it may be useful to distinguish among different types of RRA. Three types will be discussed: rent associated with the classical economists Ricardo (1821) and Faustmann (1849), as well as oligopoly rent from access regulation (licensing) and hampered output. The latter can arise in the case of downward sloping demand for a particular type of seafood from an aquaculture country.

The paper adopts the bootstrap procedures for data envelopment analysis to analyze the technical efficiency in the Vietnam’s intensive white-leg shrimp farming. The results demonstrate that the null hypothesis of constant returns-to-scale is rejected in favor of variable returns-to-scale for the production technology. Moreover, the potential improvement is greater using bootstrapping than that achieved by using the conventional data envelopment analysis, which has been widely adopted in the aquaculture literature for technical efficiency estimation.

Evidence of market integration between farmed pangasius and wild-caught whitefish is provided in the literature, pointing towards pangasius prices being determined on the large international whitefish market. In the presence of price transmission in the value chain, global growth of pangasius farming does therefore not in itself reduce the farm-gate prices in Vietnam. In this paper, price transmission in the pangasius value chain from farmers in Vietnam, via export to final consumption in Germany, is tested using the Johansen cointegration framework.

An empirical specification of the conjectural variations model, which conforms to microeconomic theory, is estimated for the US catfish industry. We find the existence of market power exerted by US catfish processors. Processors force the price paid to catfish growers down by 52.88 cent per pound of live catfish, which costs US catfish growers about $300 million a year. US catfish growers can deter the negative effects of processors’ market power by increasing their farm supply flexibility.