J Bioecon (2010) 12:179–182 DOI 10.1007/s10818-010-9089-2 Toward a global fisheries economics: an introduction to the special issue U. Rashid Sumaila · Ragnar Arnason · Glenn-Marie Lange Published online: 18 August 2010 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC. 2010 The Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO) was founded in 1945. In 1950, the Organization commenced regular publication of global fisheries data in its famous FAO Yearbook of Catch Statistics. From then, it was just a matter of time before scientists began analyzing and studying fisheries at the global level. FAO and a group of former Soviet Union scientists were among the first to begin studying and analyzing fisheries at the global level (Moiseev 1969; Gulland 1970, 1971). More recently, there has been several biological and ecological studies of global marine sys- tems, with prominent contributions from Pauly and Christensen (1995), Pauly et al. (1998), Jackson et al. (2001), Berkes et al. (2006) and Worm et al. (2006). Global fisheries studies utilizing economic analysis included Garcia and Newton (1997) and the recent World Bank and FAO (2009) publication titled The Sunken Billions. In the 1990s, several studies of fisheries management systems employed around the world were published (OECD 1997; NRC 1999) as well as an important global study of fish- eries subsidies (Milazzo 1998). A further contribution to global economics of fisheries U. R. Sumaila (B ) Fisheries Economics Research Unit, Sea Around Us, Fisheries Centre, University of British Columbia, 2202 Main Mall, Vancouver, BC V6T1Z4, Canada e-mail: r.sumaila@fisheries.ubc.ca R. Arnason Department of Economics, University of Iceland, Oddi v. Sudurgotu, 101 Reykjavik, Iceland e-mail: ragnara@hi.is G.-M. Lange Environment Department, The World Bank, 1818 H St. NW, Washington, DC 20433, USA e-mail: glange1@worldbank.org 123