Subsidies—Help or Hurt? A Study from Vietnamese Fisheries

Thuy Thi Thanh Pham, Ola Flaaten, Luong Trong Nguyen and Nghiep Ke Vu

Marine Resource Economics, 2021, vol. 36, issue 4, 369 - 387

Abstract: Subsidies are part of the set of management tools that governments apply to modernize their fishing fleets and enable them to engage in offshore and international fisheries. Research has shown that subsidies often lead to overcapacity and overfishing, resulting in the depletion of fish stocks. A few studies, however, have found some positive effects for particular subsidies. In this paper, we investigate a credit-linked subsidy scheme in Vietnam, which seems to be justified on the basis of economic, social, and environmental considerations. Both propensity score matching and endogenous switching regression methods are employed for analysis. The results show that the subsidies have had a positive effect on fishermen’s profitability, mainly because of increased revenue rather than reduced cost. However, the subsidies have benefited the owners of only the biggest vessels, and inefficiency in subsidized vessels may threaten resources and profitability in the long term.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/715358 (application/pdf)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/715358 (text/html)
Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ucp:mresec:doi:10.1086/715358

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Marine Resource Economics from University of Chicago Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Journals Division ().