Limits to the Privatization of Fishery Resources: Comment

This paper responds to the key findings of Clark, Munro, and Sumaila (2010). We restrict our response to (1) biomass targets and what they do not imply about resource ownership, (2) harvesting costs and the stock effect in fisheries and their implications for fisheries management, and (3) the effect of the intrinsic growth rate on optimal extinction and also dynamic BMEY—the level of the biomass that maximizes the sum of discounted economic returns from fishing. Despite what is asserted by Clark, Munro, and Sumaila (2010), that the deliberate extermination of a fish population may be the private owner's optimal strategy, we show that such an outcome cannot be presumed and that even with a very low intrinsic growth rate and a much larger discount rate, dynamic BMEY may still exceed the biomass that maximizes the sustainable yield, BMSY.