Economic impacts of TAC regulation: A supply-driven SAM approach

The Galician fishing fleet is one of the most important of all the European fleets that fish in European Union waters and hake is its vital species. The aim of this article is to estimate some of the economic impacts that a reduction in the TAC of hake during the period 1999–2003 have on the entire Galician economy. We use a “supply-driven” Social Accounting Matrix (SDSAM) model for the Galician fishing sector that takes hake production as exogenously given. In this respect, the present work constitutes a first attempt at applying a SDSAM model to fisheries. It also presents both the traditional backward linkage effects as well as the lesser known forward linkage effects. The SDSAM model allows us not only to compute impacts on production but also to estimate the impact distribution on household incomes and production factors. Impacts on employment have also been calculated. These results may be useful to policy makers as they provide some perceptions into the consequences of one of the measures of the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) and may help to design policy initiatives.