Publication: A Fish Cartel for Africa
Loading...
Date
2023-11-07
ISSN
Published
2023-11-07
Author(s)
Editor(s)
Abstract
Many countries sell fishing rights to foreign nations and fishers. Although African coastal waters are among the world’s most biologically rich, African countries earn much less than their peers from selling access to foreign fishers. African countries sell fishing access individually (in contrast to some Pacific countries that sell access as a bloc). This paper develops a bilateral oligopoly model to simulate the effects of an African fish cartel. The model shows that wielding market power entails both ecological and economic dimensions. Africa would substantially restrict access catch, which would increase biomass by 16 percent. This would confer economic benefits to all African nations, raising profits by an average of 23 percent. These benefits arise because market power shifts from foreign buyers to African sellers. Although impediments to sustainable development, like corruption, are hard to change in the medium term, deeper African integration is an already emerging solution to African countries’ economic and ecological challenges.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“Englander, Gabriel; Costello, Christopher. 2023. A Fish Cartel for Africa. Policy Research Working Paper; 10594. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/40576 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
Associated URLs
Associated content
Other publications in this report series
Publication Geopolitics and the World Trading System(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-12-23)Until the beginning of this century, the GATT/WTO system worked. Economic research provided a compelling explanation. It showed that if governments maximize the well-being of their own countries broadly defined, GATT/WTO principles would facilitate mutually beneficial cooperation over their trade policy choices. Now heightened geopolitical rivalry seems to have undermined the WTO. A simple transposition of the previous rationalization suggests that geopolitics and trade cooperation are not compatible. The paper shows that this is only true if rivalry eclipses any consideration of own-country well-being. In all other circumstances, there are gains from trade cooperation even with geopolitics. Furthermore, the WTO’s relevance is in question only if it adheres too rigidly to its existing rules and norms. Through measured adaptation to the geopolitical imperative, the WTO can continue to thrive as a forum for multilateral trade cooperation in the age of geopolitics.Publication Chinese Imports and Industrialization in Africa(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-05-12)The rise of China in the global economy has been linked with negative impacts on employment across many high- and middle-income countries. However, evidence for African countries is limited. This paper investigates the causal relationship between Chinese imports and manufacturing employment in Ethiopia. Imports may harm domestic firms through a revenue effect (lower market shares) or benefit them, indirectly if competition spurs innovation or directly through access to better quality or cheaper inputs. The analysis shows that a one unit increase in import penetration leads to a 15.2 percent increase in industry employment. The inputs effect is disentangled from the other two effects by decomposing total Chinese imports by their end-use category using input-output tables. The evidence shows that imported intermediate inputs are driving the employment gains. The findings are consistent with the idea that employment gains are a result of productivity gains and increases in capacity utilization. These employment gains appear to benefit large firms and labor-intensive industries disproportionately.Publication VAT Exemptions, Embedded Tax, and Unintended Consequences(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-05-15)The value-added tax (VAT) has proved to be a highly effective tool at raising revenue in developed and developing countries alike. However, the effective operation of the VAT breaks down in the presence of exemptions. Unlike zero rates, exemptions deny input tax credits, thereby increasing production costs and resulting in VAT being embedded within the prices of goods and services. This paper develops a VAT model based on input-output table and household budget survey data for 29 European countries to examine the effects of VAT exemptions on final prices and to assess the merits of their use. Simulation results show that exemptions suffer from the same targeting problems as reduced VAT rates, but, in addition, they are non-transparent and have unpredictable and counterproductive indirect effects. These effects are in addition to the well-known distortionary impact of exemptions on production decisions, and their creation of incentives to self-supply. The paper concludes that the use of exemptions should be limited to addressing pragmatic concerns, such as the disproportionate compliance costs of small businesses and the practical difficulty in taxing margin-based financial services.Publication Disentangling the Key Economic Channels through Which Infrastructure Affects Jobs(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-04-03)This paper takes stock of the literature on infrastructure and jobs published since the early 2000s, using a conceptual framework to identify the key channels through which different types of infrastructure impact jobs. Where relevant, it highlights the different approaches and findings in the cases of energy, digital, and transport infrastructure. Overall, the literature review provides strong evidence of infrastructure’s positive impact on employment, particularly for women. In the case of electricity, this impact arises from freeing time that would otherwise be spent on household tasks. Similarly, digital infrastructure, particularly mobile phone coverage, has demonstrated positive labor market effects, often driven by private sector investments rather than large public expenditures, which are typically required for other large-scale infrastructure projects. The evidence on structural transformation is also positive, with some notable exceptions, such as studies that find no significant impact on structural transformation in rural India in the cases of electricity and roads. Even with better market connections, remote areas may continue to lack economic opportunities, due to the absence of agglomeration economies and complementary inputs such as human capital. Accordingly, reducing transport costs alone may not be sufficient to drive economic transformation in rural areas. The spatial dimension of transformation is particularly relevant for transport, both internationally—by enhancing trade integration—and within countries, where economic development tends to drive firms and jobs toward urban centers, benefitting from economies scale and network effects. Turning to organizational transformation, evidence on skill bias in developing countries is more mixed than in developed countries and may vary considerably by context. Further research, especially on the possible reasons explaining the differences between developed and developing economies, is needed.Publication Economic Consequences of Trade and Global Value Chain Integration(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2025-04-04)This paper introduces a new approach to measuring Global Value Chains (GVC), crucial for informed policy-making. It features a tripartite classification (backward, forward, and two-sided) covering trade and production data. The findings indicate that traditional trade-based GVC metrics significantly underestimate global GVC activity, especially in sectors like services and upstream manufacturing, and overstate risks in early trade liberalization stages. Additionally, conventional backward-forward classifications over-estimate backward linkages. The paper further applies these measures empirically to assess how GVC participation mediates the impact of demand shocks on domestic output, highlighting both the exposure and stabilizing potential of GVC integration. These new measures are comprehensively available on the World Bank’s WITS Platform, providing a key resource for GVC analysis.
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Collections
Related items
Showing items related by metadata.
Publication Global Expansion of Marine Protected Areas and the Redistribution of Fishing Effort(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-01-10)The expansion of marine protected areas (MPAs) is a core focus of global conservation efforts, with the “30x30” initiative to protect 30% of the ocean by 2030 serving as a prominent example of this trend. This paper examines a series of proposed MPA network expansions of various sizes and forecasts the impact that increased protection could have on global patterns of fishing effort. This is accomplished using a predictive machine learning model trained on a global dataset of satellite-based fishing vessel monitoring data, current MPA locations, and spatiotemporal environmental, geographic, political, and economic features. The model predicts future fishing effort under various MPA expansion scenarios, compared to a business-as-usual counterfactual scenario that includes no new MPAs. The difference between these scenarios represents the predicted change in fishing effort resulting from MPA expansion. The results show that, regardless of the MPA network's objective or size, fishing effort would decrease inside the MPAs, though by much less than 100%. Moreover, this reduction in fishing effort within MPAs does not simply shift outside—fishing effort outside MPAs also declines. The overall magnitude of the predicted decrease in global fishing effort principally depends on where networks are placed in relation to existing fishing effort. MPA expansion will lead to a global redistribution of fishing effort, which should be considered in network design, implementation, and impact evaluation.Publication Information and Spillovers from Targeting Policy in Peru's Anchoveta Fishery(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-12)This paper establishes that a targeted policy backfires because it reveals information about non-targeted units. In the world’s largest fishery, the regulator attempts to reduce the harvesting of juvenile fish by temporarily closing areas where the share of juvenile catch is high. By combining administrative microdata with biologically richer data from fishing firms, the analysis isolates variation in closures that is due to the regulator’s lower resolution data. Closures cause substantial temporal and spatial spillovers. Closures increase total juvenile catch by 48 percent because closure announcements implicitly signal that there is high productivity fishing before, just outside, and after closures.Publication The Value of Information in a Congested Fishery(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2023-08-15)Congestion can reduce the value of a fishery, resulting in a lower total catch for the same amount of labor, fuel, and equipment expended in fishing activities. Absent the congestion externality, better information about the location and size of fish stocks enables fishers to make more efficient decisions. However, more precise information can cause fishers to converge on the same location or increase fishing at the same time. The cost of the resulting increased congestion can outweigh the direct benefit of better information. This paper identifies the circumstances where an increase in the precision of public and/or private information (about stock size or location) lowers industry profits. Using high-resolution data from Peru’s anchoveta fishery, the world’s largest by catch volume, the research reveals that despite considerable congestion, more precise private information would increase expected profits. On the other hand, the profit impact of more precise public information is positive but significantly smaller. This difference reflects the fact that public information increases congestion to a much greater extent, compared to private information. The policy implications are that improving private information about fish stocks—for example through firms investing in forecasting and decision-making technology—could increase industry profits. But anchoveta fishers would not necessarily benefit from more precise public information. As fishery managers control the accessibility and disclosure of information, decisions to make private information public, such as publishing near real-time catch data, could potentially lower fisher profits.Publication Input Subsidies and the Depletion of Natural Capital(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2023-04-21)Input subsidies in natural resource sectors are widely believed to deplete the natural capital on which these sectors depend. However, estimating the causal effect of subsidies on resource extraction has been stymied by identification and data challenges. China’s fishing fleet is the world’s largest, and in 2016 the government changed its fuel subsidy policy for distant water vessels to one that increases with predetermined vessel characteristics. Regression discontinuity estimates imply a long-run elasticity of fishing hours with respect to fuel subsidies of 2.2. Consequently, reducing Chinese fuel subsidies by 50 percent could eliminate biological overfishing in several ocean regions. By demonstrating the substantial impact of fuel subsidies on fishing activity and fish stocks, the findings inform ongoing subsidy reform in China, other nations with subsidized fishing vessel fuel, and the World Trade Organization.Publication Saving Fish and Fisheries : Towards Sustainable and Equitable Governance of the Global Fishing Sector(Washington, DC, 2004-05)This Fisheries Sector Approach Paper has been written in recognition of the mounting challenges that the World Bank and the developing world face in meeting the fishery sector-related Millennium Development Goals and the outcomes of the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development. It augments the Bank's Rural Strategy, Reaching the Rural Poor, which advocates a holistic approach to rural poverty reduction, and support for equitable growth. The paper also builds on the World Bank's Environmental Strategy, Making Sustainable Commitments, a major pillar of which is the protection of the regional and global commons, in addition to the improvement in the quality of life and the quality of growth of the World Bank's clients. The paper treats the needs of the sector in greater depth, focusing in particular on the improvement of the livelihoods of the millions of poor fishers, and the sustainability of the inland and marine regional and global commons, which define the quality of life of their users. Also, public and international awareness has been raised by an ever increasing stream of evidence that many of the world's fisheries are over-fished, catches are declining, and fishers' livelihoods are degrading along with the natural ecosystems they exploit
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
Publication Global Regulations, Institutional Development, and Market Authorities Perspective Toolkit (GRIDMAP) - Framework and Methodology(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-12-05)GRIDMAP--the Global Regulations, Institutional Development, and Market Authorities Perspective Toolkit--provides emerging markets and developing economies (EMDEs) with a “Minimum Package” of policies to build markets that are trustworthy, safe, and competitive. The “Minimum Package” sets out essential regulatory provisions, institutional arrangements, and implementation and enforcement needed for those markets to thrive. GRIDMAP will provide modules focused on various subjects of market regulation, such as consumer protection and data markets.Publication Economic Recovery(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-04-06)World Bank Group President David Malpass spoke about the world facing major challenges, including COVID, climate change, rising poverty and inequality and growing fragility and violence in many countries. He highlighted vaccines, working closely with Gavi, WHO, and UNICEF, the World Bank has conducted over one hundred capacity assessments, many even more before vaccines were available. The World Bank Group worked to achieve a debt service suspension initiative and increased transparency in debt contracts at developing countries. The World Bank Group is finalizing a new climate change action plan, which includes a big step up in financing, building on their record climate financing over the past two years. He noted big challenges to bring all together to achieve GRID: green, resilient, and inclusive development. Janet Yellen, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, mentioned focusing on vulnerable people during the pandemic. Kristalina Georgieva, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, focused on giving everyone a fair shot during a sustainable recovery. All three commented on the importance of tackling climate change.Publication Remarks at the United Nations Biodiversity Conference(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-10-12)World Bank Group President David Malpass discussed biodiversity and climate change being closely interlinked, with terrestrial and marine ecosystems serving as critically important carbon sinks. At the same time climate change acts as a direct driver of biodiversity and ecosystem services loss. The World Bank has financed biodiversity conservation around the world, including over 116 million hectares of Marine and Coastal Protected Areas, 10 million hectares of Terrestrial Protected Areas, and over 300 protected habitats, biological buffer zones and reserves. The COVID pandemic, biodiversity loss, climate change are all reminders of how connected we are. The recovery from this pandemic is an opportunity to put in place more effective policies, institutions, and resources to address biodiversity loss.Publication Media and Messages for Nutrition and Health(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-06)The Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Lao PDR) has experienced rapid and significant economic growth over the past decade. However, poor nutritional outcomes remain a concern. Rates of childhood undernutrition are particularly high in remote, rural, and upland areas. Media have the potential to play an important role in shaping health and nutrition–related behaviors and practices as well as in promoting sociocultural and economic development that might contribute to improved nutritional outcomes. This report presents the results of a media audit (MA) that was conducted to inform the development and production of mass media advocacy and communication strategies and materials with a focus on maternal and child health and nutrition that would reach the most people from the poorest communities in northern Lao PDR. Making more people aware of useful information, essential services and products and influencing them to use these effectively is the ultimate goal of mass media campaigns, and the MA measures the potential effectiveness of media efforts to reach this goal. The effectiveness of communication channels to deliver health and nutrition messages to target beneficiaries to ensure maximum reach and uptake can be viewed in terms of preferences, satisfaction, and trust. Overall, the four most accessed media channels for receiving information among communities in the study areas were village announcements, mobile phones, television, and out-of-home (OOH) media. Of the accessed media channels, the top three most preferred channels were village announcements (40 percent), television (26 percent), and mobile phones (19 percent). In terms of trust, village announcements were the most trusted source of information (64 percent), followed by mobile phones (14 percent) and television (11 percent). Hence of all the media channels, village announcements are the most preferred, have the most satisfied users, and are the most trusted source of information in study communities from four provinces in Lao PDR with some of the highest burden of childhood undernutrition.Publication Education, Social Norms, and the Marriage Penalty(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-10-16)A growing literature attributes gender inequality in labor market outcomes in part to the reduction in female labor supply after childbirth, the child penalty. However, if social norms constrain married women’s activities outside the home, then marriage can independently reduce employment, even in the absence childbearing. Given the correlation in timing between childbirth and marriage, conventional estimates of child penalties will conflate these two effects. The paper studies the marriage penalty in South Asia, a context featuring conservative gender norms and low female labor force participation. The study introduces a split-sample, pseudo-panel approach that allows for the separation of marriage and child penalties even in the absence of individual-level panel data. Marriage reduces women’s labor force participation in South Asia by 12 percentage points, whereas the marginal penalty of childbearing is small. Consistent with the central roles of both opportunity costs and social norms, the marriage penalty is smaller among cohorts with higher education and less conservative gender attitudes.