A methodology for analyzing the impact of the artisanal fishing fleets on regional economies: An application for the case of Asturias (Spain)

- Methodology to quantify regional importance of European artisanal fishing fleets.
- Isolating artisanal fleet's activity by disaggregating Input-Output tables.
- Estimating impacts by means of output, employment and gross value added multipliers.
- Case study results in Asturias (Spain) confirm artisanal fleet's strategic importance.
- Higher employment and gross value added multipliers than the rest of fisheries sector.

Artisanal fleets represent one of the most sustainable fishing segments. Under the current Common Fisheries Policy (CFP), a key issue consists of quantifying their contribution to employment and value added generation in local economies, but methodological tools have not been specifically developed to analyze this question and few empirical quantifications have been carried out due to lack of information (output, intermediate consumptions, primary inputs, etc.). This paper presents a methodology to measure the importance of artisanal fleets in an economy, on the basis of input-output (IO) analysis and by applying a disaggregation procedure that allows for distinguishing their activity when this information is aggregated into one of the sectors observable on an IO table. An empirical exercise has been conducted for the case of the artisanal fishing fleet of Asturias (region in Northwest Spain) by drawing together many different sources of data concerning its activity and by splitting the whole “Fisheries and aquaculture” sector in the symmetric IO table. The new IO table has allowed to estimate the impact of the artisanal fishing fleet's activity, showing that it exerted in 2010 higher multiplier effects on regional employment and income than the whole economy and the rest of the fisheries sector (basically, the industrial fleet). Findings also revealed that the potential of the artisanal fleet to generate gross value added is particularly important. Our results also suggest that sectoral disaggregation of IO tables is a highly versatile, useful and replicable methodology for socioeconomic studies of artisanal fisheries.