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.