WHAT SAVED THE WHALES? AN ECONOMIC ANALYSIS OF 20TH

1,12

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CENTURY WHALING

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stron

2514

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University College London

2002

rok

Introduction: explaining the whaling cycle

Global whale catch statistics have been collected since the late 1860s. In the 20th Century, the

data show a sustained increase in global catch until the start of the 1960s after which catches

decline markedly and stocks appear to stabilise. Analysis of the data reveals a whaling cycle very

much as would be expected for an open-access marine resource that is initially abundant but which

then gets successively overexploited, species by species. The resulting scarcity motivated

international efforts to regulate the catch and those regulations determine the current whale stock at

an albeit much reduced level compared to a century ago. But how far were international regulations

the driving force in stabilising whale populations? In this paper we argue that economic forces

leading to reduced catches were at work long before international regulations came into being. To a

considerable extent, therefore, harvests would have stabilised anyway. As others have shown with

respect to various international environmental agreements (e.g. Barrett, 1994), co-operative

international regulation often formalises a non-co-operative outcome, i.e. the outcome that would

have occurred in the absence of the regulation. As such, agreements may be self-enforcing. Such

a conclusion should not detract from co-operative regulatory efforts, but it does suggest that those

efforts are less effective than some political and legal analysts might argue. We identify two basic

economic forces at work. First, as predicted in bio-economic theory (e.g. Clark, 1973, 1990),

declining stocks raise the unit costs of harvest, making whaling ultimately less attractive from a

commercial standpoint. Offsetting this effect is technological change in the whaling industry that

lowered costs for long periods, explaining why the demise of the whaling population takes a

substantial period to materialise. Second, whaling products have substitutes and as these

substitutes became more plentiful, so the commercial incentive to catch whales declined. In order

to isolate the various forces at work, we produce a straightforward econometric analysis of whale

catch time series and the economic factors determining catches.