The Tragedy of the Commons in International
Fisheries: An Empirical Examination
Stephanie McWhinnie∗
School of Economics, University of Adelaide
SA 5005, Australia
Telephone: +61-8-8303-5756
Facsimile: +61-8-8223-1460
stephanie.mcwhinnie@adelaide.edu.au
This Version: July 2006
∗Especial thanks go to members of the Sea Around Us project for their support in accessing
the catch and price data used in this paper. Continuing advice and encouragement from Brian
Copeland, Gordon Munro, Rashid Sumaila, Siwan Anderson, Erwin Diewert and Jacob Wong is
gratefully acknowledged, as are comments from participants at the Conference on Fisheries Eco-
nomics and Management in Honour of Professor Gordon R. Munro, the Canadian Resource and
Environmental Economics Study Group, the empirical and FEM lunches at the University of British
Columbia, and seminar participants at Australian National University, University of Canterbury,
Carleton University, Middlebury College, Ryerson University, and Wilfrid Laurier University.
1
The Tragedy of the Commons in International
Fisheries: An Empirical Examination
Abstract
Historically, all capture fisheries have proven hard to manage; internationally shared
stocks face an additional impediment to effective management. Previous fisheries
studies estimate gains from cooperation for particular species or locations, but evi-
dence is lacking on the wider effect that international sharing has in relation to other
variables that affect stock status. This paper is an attempt to shed a broader light
on the effect of sharing by identifying whether shared fish stocks are systematically
more exploited. I compile exploitation status, biological and economic data into a
unique two-period panel of more than two-hundred fish stocks from around the globe
with which I test the theoretical implications of sharing. The empirical results from
ordered category estimation suggest that shared stocks are indeed more prone to
overexploitation.
Keywords: International fisheries, Tragedy of the Commons, exploitation stat