Measuring boat-level efficiency in Commonwealth fisheries: An example using the Commonwealth Trawl Sector of the Southern and Eastern Scalefish and Shark Fishery

Paper presented at the Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society (AARES) 2016 Conference.

Australian Commonwealth fisheries are managed with the objective of maximising economic returns to the Australian community - an objective that may be served by increasing the efficiency of the fishing fleet. This paper presents a stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) of the Commonwealth Trawl Sector (CTS) of the Southern and Eastern Scalefish and Shark Fishery. ABARES used boat-level data to explore the potential of the SFA approach to determine the efficiency of the fleet and find reasons for any inefficiencies.

This preliminary work: • indicates significant inefficiency in the CTS fleet • provides some support for the hypothesis that a structural adjustment in 2006 resulted in less efficient boats leaving the fishery, which led to improved economic returns • shows that interannual effects, such as stock availability, management changes and technical change, play a large role in the estimated frontier and must be disentangled from each other in further work to provide more information for managers.