Abstract

This paper applies a life-cycle approach to the West of Scotland fishery for atlantic cod. It acknowledges the fish stock as a harvestable resource regardless of growth levels and drops the assumption usually accepted in fishery models that a long-run non-zero bioeconomic equilibrium will develop where the catch and growth will be equal. Instead, successive short-run economic equilibria develop at the cost of long-run equilibrium. The impact of this is to treat the growth and output as corrections to the volume of the fish stock reserve. A second consequence is that the control variable representing the presence of the fish stock in the production function can be re-defined to accommodate it. The model simulates the rise and fall of the fishery from 1950 to 2011 and calculates the coefficients of a production function.