92 



Fishery Bulletin 88(1), 1990 



Ocean, ami the U.S. canned tuna market was inundated 

 by imports. These events undoubtedly contributed to 

 the unstable pattern of productivity growth, and would 

 have introduced additional, unmeasurable disturbance 

 into the system which we are unable to disentangle 

 from the pn.xluctivity ivsidual in the gi'owth-accounting 

 framework." 



Concluding remarks 



We have shown how the nonparametric growtli-accoujit- 

 ing framework can be modified to measure the growth 

 in total-factor productivity or technical [irogress of 

 fishing fleets. This framework can provide useful in- 

 formation for tracking and analyzing economic growth 

 and its causal factors in a fishing industry, particular- 

 ly where short tinie-sei'ies of aggregate data are all that 

 is available. Our approach can be readily implemented 

 in fishing industries in both developed and developing 

 countries, even by non-economist fishery analysts. 

 Unique to our approach is the treatment of the fishery 

 resource, not as a conventional input, but as a techno- 

 logical constraint on production. Our empirical analysis 

 of total-factor productivity growth in the U.S. tropical 

 tuna fleet demonstrates that disentangling the produc- 

 tivity residual from changes in I'esoiu'ce alumtlance pro- 

 vides markedly different results. 



We consider capital the most important component 

 of aggregate input because it is represented by the 

 basic unit of production, the fishing vessel. The capital 

 stock— the fishing fleet— determines capacity output in 

 both an economic and engineering sense. Theoi'etical- 

 ly, it is the flow of services from the capital stock that 

 should serve as the capital input when measuring total- 

 factor productivity. In practice, however, one may not 

 have measures of the flow of capital services, in which 

 case proper specification of the capital input, and ac- 

 counting for temporary equililirium effects such as 

 variations in the degree of capacity utilization, becomes 

 extremely important. 



"Because our biomass adjustment is based only on changes in 

 yellowfin tuna resource abundance in the CYRA. the variation in 

 total-factor productivity should become more pronounced as the 

 fleet moved from the eastern to the western Pacific Ocean during 

 the 1981-8.5 period. Furthermore, there were likely to have been 

 some initial technical inefficiencies as the fleet began fishing in the 

 relatively unfamiliar western Pacific. 



New investment and industry restructurings can have very real 

 detrimental effects upon the time-path of productivity growth. 

 Therefore, we would expect to see unstable productivity growth 

 as firms adapt over time to changing industrial conditions. Under 

 such circumstances, the assumptions underlying our model— 

 constant-returns-to-scale, disembodied Hick's-neutral technical 

 change conditions, and technical efficiency— may not fully apply. 

 Nonetheless, these are limitations of virtually any application using 

 the growth-accounting framework. 



Acknowledgments 



Senior authorship is not assigned. The comments of 

 Andy Dizon, Roberto Enriquez, Susan Hanna, Dan 

 Huppert, Bruce Rettig, and two anonymous referees 

 have substantially improved the paper and are grateful- 

 ly acknowledged. We wish to thank Jeffrey Lee and 

 Patrick Tomlinson for technical assistance in the prep- 

 aration of this manuscript. The authors remain respon- 

 sible for any errors. The views expressed are not neces- 

 sarily those of the National Marine Fisheries Service. 



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