107 Marine Resource Economics, Volume 26, pp. 107–110 ISSN 0738-1360 Printed in the U.S.A. All rights reserved. Copyright © 2012 MRE Foundation, Inc. Thalassorama The Centenary of Jens Warming’s Optimal Landing Tax in Fisheries HåkAN EggERt University of gothenburg Abstract This note acknowledges Jens Warming’s contributions (1911, 1931) on what has since come to be known as the open access problem in isheries. Warming, in a static framework, suggested an optimal landing tax before Pigou (1920) and described the sole owner solution later suggested by Scott (1955b). I describe these results using Warming’s framework and point to his previously overlooked contribu- tion concerning the dynamic aspect of isheries. Key words Fisheries, open access, optimal tax, rights-based management, Warming landing tax. JEL Classiication Code Q2. H. Scott Gordon (1954) is the standard reference of the open-access problem in isheries. Although the Danish economist Jens Warming provided equivalent results in two earlier articles (1911, 1931), he wrote in Danish and his contributions were not presented to an international audience until the 1980s (Andersen 1983; Hannesson and Anderson 1981). In this note, I focus on Warming’s description of how an optimal fee collected by the gov- ernment, which I label a Warming landing tax, could prevent the dissipation of resource rent and lead to a lower, optimal number of ishermen compared to the outcome in an unregulated ishery. Similarly, Warming also described how a sole owner would arrive at setting the optimal lease fee leading to the optimal outcome. Warming’s point of departure was that in an eficient market, wages are determined by the marginal product of the marginal worker, where isheries provide an exception, as ishermen have the freedom to enter and will do so until their average product equals their opportunity cost of ishing; i.e., what they could earn in other sectors. According to Warming, the state has a natural instrument to regulate this failure by collecting rent; i.e., the difference between the maximum yield per person and the sum of normal wages and other costs. In fact, maximum catch may not be the objective, rather the catch where the marginal isherman’s productivity is equal to that in other occupations; i.e., he recognizes the difference between what modern undergraduate textbooks refer to as the Maximum Sustainable Yield (MSY) and the Maximum Economic Yield (Warming 1911). Later, Warming learned of a particular isheries regulation in Denmark, which grant- ed coastal owners the right to inshore ishing for eel with ixed gear. When he read about the claim from the Danish ishermen organization to abolish the Right to Eel Weir, he reconsidered the problem and published another article in Danish where he developed his Håkan Eggert is an associate professor, Department of Economics, University of Gothenburg, PO Box 640, Gothenburg, Sweden (email Hakan.Eggert@economics.gu.se). Financial support from Formas through the program Human Cooperation to Manage Natural Resources (COMMONS) is acknowledged.