Troubled fishing in Pacific waters

The Pacific island countries persist with tuna fishing policies that are significantly inferior to what appear to be the economically and environmentally sensible courses to follow. Economists have been offering advice over a fairly long period about better policy options without having any discernable favourable impact. This lack of success might be due, as Gordon Tullock once said, to the fact that economists tend to flit from one area to another in demonstrating problems with government policies. Tullock suggested that economists, whose primary task is to prod governments towards better policies, could have better success if individual economists focused on one issue and continually endeavoured to educate the public and the government about the problems with that particular socially inferior intervention. It is in that spirit that I discuss again problems that I and others see in the tuna fishing policies of the Pacific island countries. I also examine some of the costs of existing policies and reasons for these governments failing to follow what appear to be policies that will maximise the benefits from the exploitation of this resource in an environmentally sustainable manner.