Who Keeps the Conservation Dividend? Size Limit Coverage in Shared Fisheries

A minimum size limit protects young fish. These fish grow, and the extra catch they provide later is the conservation dividend. We ask who receives it when the limit covers some users only. A group covered by the limit gains only if its share of the dividend is larger than the catch it gives up. Covering more users mainly makes the dividend larger. It barely changes each group’s share. In a model of the French sea bass fishery, a 42 cm limit applied to commercial fleets alone lets half of the dividend go to other users. Commercial fleets then lose. The same limit applied to all users, as in 2015, makes commercial fleets better off. Among commercial fleets, limits that differ by gear do better than a single limit. This holds only if fish below the limit escape the gear alive, as with rules on mesh size.