RESEARCH

The adoption of biodegradable fishing gear offers a potential solution to the pervasive issue of abandoned, lost, or otherwise discarded fishing gear (ALDFG), a major contributor to global marine plastic pollution. ALDFG not only harms marine ecosystems but also affects fishers and the seafood industry. Lack of fishers’ acceptance is an important barrier to policies and initiatives aimed at promoting the use of such gear. Conducting interviews with fishers in Norway provides insights into the origins of opposition among fishers, potentially hindering the intention to adopt biodegradable fishing gear. This exploration mainly examines how acceptance is shaped by economic incentives and behavioural factors. Results highlight the substantial influence of both economic incentives and behavioural factors on the intention to adopt biodegradable gear, with the latter exerting a greater impact. This study underscores the need for policymakers to implement strategies to encourage the adoption of biodegradable gear and address ALDFG effectively.

Read more

This study evaluates the Vietnamese shrimp farming industry through a Triple Bottom Line (TBL) perspective, using the Aquaculture Performance Indicators (API) to assess social, economic, and environmental performance. Over the past 25 years, Vietnamese shrimp farming has grown rapidly and diversified into four systems: Extensive, Semi-intensive, Intensive, and Super-intensive, and data is collected for all these systems. The results reveal that Intensive and Super-intensive systems perform well economically, while Extensive and Semi-intensive systems have a weaker performance. Social performance is relatively similar across the four systems. Managerial returns are high across all systems, with labor returns notably higher in intensive systems. With respect to environmental performance, Intensive farms score poorly, whereas extensive systems perform well. Key challenges for shrimp farming systems with high intensity levels include water use and effluent management, contributing to disease prevalence. While mangrove forest degradation was a historical issue, replanting efforts have increased forest cover, albeit with reduced biodiversity. On a global scale, Vietnam’s shrimp farming aligns with global averages but is outperforming the global industry significantly in post-production practices.

Read more 

This paper presents a global synthesis of economic values for ecosystem services provided by 15 terrestrial and marine biomes. Information from over 1,300 studies, yielding over 9,400 value estimates in monetary units, has been collected and organised in the Ecosystem Services Valuation Database (ESVD). This is a substantial expansion of data since the de Groot et al. (2012) description of the ESVD and provides an important juncture to explore developments in the use of valuation methods and the contexts in which valuations are conducted. In this paper we provide summary values for 23 ecosystem services from 15 biomes to represent the magnitude, variation and gaps in economic values. To enable the comparison and synthesis of values, estimates in the ESVD are standardised to a common set of units (Int$/ha/year at 2020 price levels). This data provides a basis for value transfers to inform decision-making in current policy contexts but requires due consideration and adjustment for context specific determinants of value....

Read more 

Parental and family backgrounds play crucial roles in driving children’s cognitive development. However, in developing countries, self-employment is far more prevalent than wage employment. Despite its significance, limited research has examined how parental employment status influences cognitive development within this context. Given the potential benefits of wage employment for cognitive development, this study examines whether parents’ wage jobs could positively affect children’s cognitive skills. Using data on children aged 8-12 years old in Ethiopia, India, and Vietnam from the Young Lives Survey, we employ a value-added specification to analyze cognitive formation. Our findings reveal that fathers’ wage jobs have a positive effect on the cognitive scores of 8-year-old children in Ethiopia and Vietnam, ranging from 0.116 to 0.210 standard deviations of cognitive scores. The effect from fathers’ wage jobs is sizable compared to the effects from family, school, and neighborhood characteristics. However, such an effect is not found for 12-year-old children. By causal mediation analysis, it is proved that father wage jobs affect cognitive skills through material investment for 8-year-old children in Vietnam and Ethiopia. Our study provides the first empirical evidence regarding the effect of parental employment on the cognitive development of their children in the context of developing countries. Moreover, our empirical findings suggests that policies aimed at facilitating the transition of from informal to formal employment in developing countries may enhance human capital development.

Read more

* Undergraduate student

The use of biodegradable fishing gear is increasingly seen as a way to mitigate the negative impacts associated with abandoned, lost, or otherwisediscarded fishing gear (ALDFG), often referred to as “ghost gear”. However, a major concern with such an environmentally friendly technique is its potential to reduce fishing efficiency due to its degradable characteristics, which may diminish competitiveness. To contribute to the limited empirical evidence, we conducted a survey experiment to investigate how the effectiveness of biodegradable gear, compared to conventional fishing gear, influences the adoption by Norwegian fishers. Our findings reveal that fishers are willing to adopt biodegradable fishing gear without conditions if its fishing efficiency is comparable to conventional gear. We consider alternative adoption conditions and find that, as the relative efficiency of biodegradable gear decreases, the individual adoption decision becomes more conditional on other fishers doing so. These findings suggest that competitive pressures matter to widespread the adoption of biodegradable gear. Specifically, widespread adoption depends on improving the relative fishing efficiency of biodegradable gear or implementing policies that lead to broad adoption. Results indicates that marine environment protection concerns drive adoption, while economic concerns drive opposition.

Ghost fishing occurs when abandoned, lost, or otherwise discarded fishing gear---also known as ``ghost gear"---persists in catching and killing harvested species. Some previous studies found positive net benefits of ghost gear retrieval programs, but these studies treated ``ghosted fish'' as foregone harvest rather than stock removals. We constructed a bio-economic model of a derby fishery generating ghost gear, and we used the model to compare harvest management strategies and assess the impacts of ghost fishing in the Norwegian snow crab fishery. The model combines a Beverton-Holt stock-recruitment function with a fleet of heterogeneous profit-maximizing vessels operating in a derby fishery. We calibrated the model using biological parameter estimates from previous studies, aggregate fishery statistics from recent stock assessments, and 2020 data on vessel-level harvest, days-at-sea, and operating costs. We used the model to simulate counterfactual steady-state conditions, holding the fleet capacity in 2020 fixed, under quantity and price incentives with and without a ghost gear retrieval program. Our results suggest that eliminating the 2020 TAC would halve steady-state rents, the 2020 TAC was below the efficient level, and an efficient TAC would perform nearly as well as an efficient harvest tax. Or results also suggest that, contrary to previous studies, the cost of the ghost gear retrieval program outweighs its benefits to harvesters in additional resource rents. We assessed the robustness of our results by using sensitivity analysis to identify parameter values that would reverse our finding on the inefficiency of the existing ghost gear retrieval program.

This study examines the impact of social capital, specifically trust in various stakeholders, on production efficiency and variability in shrimp farming in Vietnam. We employed the stochastic frontier analysis approach and the production variation function to a dataset of 349 small-scale shrimp farms, collected in 2022 in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam. There exists the existence of production inefficiency and variability – also knowns as production risk. This study also finds the evidence showing the effect of social capital measured by trust in key stakeholders in rural communities on production performance and variability. Trust in formal networks reduces production risk. Interestingly, trust in informal networks shows a trade-off between efficiency and variability—improving efficiency while increasing variability. However, there is no statistical evidence supports a relationship between trust in input providers and either production performance or risk. These results offer valuable insights for policy measures aimed at improving both the performance and stability of the shrimp farming sector in developing countries.