Fishery harvest control rules from bioeconomic optimization

Harvest control rules (HCRs) are a central part of multiannual fisheries management plans as they are used to determine the appropriate catch levels based on current stock levels. Typically these HCRs are constructed using biological reference points, and although fisheries are inherently an economic activity, it is not common to use economic variables explicitly in the process. For this reason there is a need to know how a conventional HCR respond to changes in economic parameters, e.g. prices, costs or discount rates. This paper presents a method to construct HCRs from a bioeconomic optimization of an age-structured population, thereby bringing economics into conventional fishery management. The HCRs obtained therefore depend on both biological and economic parameters of the fishery. Sensitivity analysis is performed to illustrate this. The HCR is considerably sensitive to cost parameters, thus highlighting the need to consider economic assessments of fisheries parallel to the usual stock assessments.