273 
National Marine 
Fisheries Service 
NOAA 
Fishery Bulletin 
ft- established in 1881 
Spencer F. Baird 
First U.S. Commissioner 
of Fisheries and founder 
of Fishery Bulletin 
Measuring change in productivity of a fishery 
with the Bennet-Bowley indicator 
Email address for contact author: john.walden@noaa.gov 
Abstract— -The U.S. National Marine 
Fisheries Service has undertaken to 
measure the economic performance 
of fisheries that have implemented 
catch shares as a management strat- 
egy. Among the metrics used, change 
in productivity was identified as im- 
portant, and considerable research 
has been conducted to construct met- 
rics and to measure this change. We 
introduce the Bennet-Bowley (BB) 
indicator as another tool to measure 
change in productivity, show how 
to construct the indicator, and ap- 
ply it to the northeast multispecies 
fishery, which adopted a catch share 
system in 2010. The BB indicator is 
then used to show the contribution 
of vessels entering, continuing with- 
in, and exiting the fishery to overall 
fleet productivity. Results showed 
that after catch share management, 
fleet productivity declined and that 
vessels continuing in the fishery 
as a group contributed the most to 
a decline in aggregate productivity. 
On a per-vessel basis, a core group 
of vessels continuing in the fishery 
and that were present throughout 
the study period showed a decline in 
productivity after catch share man- 
agement was implemented. These 
declines were caused by reduced out- 
puts (i.e. catch) in relation to use of 
inputs (e.g. labor, fuel, materials) af- 
ter catch shares were implemented. 
Manuscript submitted 5 August 2016. 
Manuscript accepted 16 March 2017. 
Fish. Bull. 115:273-283 (2017) 
Online publication date: 25 April 2017. 
doi: 10.7755/FB. 115.3.1 
The views and opinions expressed or 
implied in this article are those of the 
author (or authors) and do not necessarily 
reflect the position of the National 
Marine Fisheries Service, NOAA. 
John B. Walden (contact author ) 1 
Rolf Fare 2 3 
Shawna Grosskopf 4 5 
1 Northeast Fisheries Science Center 
National Marine Fisheries Service, NOAA 
166 Water Street 
Woods Hole, Massachusetts 02543 
2 Department of Economics and 
Department of Applied Economics 
Oregon State University 
Ballard Extension Hall 
Corvallis, Oregon 97331 
3 Department of Agricultural and 
Resource Economics 
University of Maryland 
College Park, Maryland 20742 
Management of commercial and rec- 
reational fisheries has long been a 
topic of interest in public policy cir- 
cles. This interest is due to the com- 
mon pool nature of the resource, and 
the human dimension of the various 
user groups that rely on the resource 
for food, income, and recreational 
opportunities. Policy choices for the 
management of the resource are typi- 
cally multidimensional, and involve a 
variety of regulatory instruments to 
control catch. Because management 
decisions are usually tied to the sta- 
tus of fish stocks, governments typi- 
cally monitor and assess changes in 
the fish biomass on a regular basis. 
However, there is often not an equiv- 
alent monitoring system to track 
changes in the socio-economic status 
and well-being of resource users who 
depend on the fishery for part, or all, 
of their livelihood. 
Gradually, there has been a shift 
in terms of assessing changes which 
take place among marine fishery 
user groups, particularly after impor- 
4 Department of Economics 
Oregon State University 
Bexell Hall 
Corvallis, Oregon 97331 
5 Centre for Environmental and Resource 
Economics (CERE) 
Department of Economics 
Umea University 
S-901 87, Umea, Sweden 
tant management modifications have 
taken place. In the United States, 
this shift in appraisal has been 
partially due to further adoption of 
“rights based management” in fish- 
eries, also known as “catch shares,” 
which secures a certain share of the 
total allowable catch (TAC) from 
a fishery for an individual vessel 
owner, community or association. 
Although catch shares have existed 
in some form since 1990 in U.S. fish- 
eries, recent interest in expanding 
catch shares to multiple fisheries 
has generated interest in creating a 
consistent set of socio-economic per- 
formance indicators for these fisher- 
ies (Clay et al., 2014; Murphy et al., 
2015). Currently, the same effort has 
not taken place for recreational fish- 
eries. Consequently, the focus in our 
study will be on commercial fishing 
vessels. 
The interest in evaluating eco- 
nomic and social changes centered 
on fishing fleets and communities is 
a positive development. It recognizes 
