International Journal of Social Economics 24,1/2/3 128 Fishery management, environmental protection and trade liberalization H.F. Campbell University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia A. McIlgorm Australian Maritime College, Australia, and B.M. Tsamenyi University of Wollongong, Wollongong, Australia 1 Introduction This paper is concerned with the management of the marine environment. The marine environment generates a flow of goods and services and the objective of management is assumed to be to maximize the sustainable value of that flow. T he values generated by the marine environment can be classified as either use or non-use values: examples of use values are direct uses such as commercial fishing or recreation in the form of fishing and diving, and indirect uses such as viewing film of marine life; examples of non-use values include existence, bequest and option values (see Adamowicz et al., 1991). Recent developments in the theory and practice of fishery management (DPIE, 1989) have resulted in increases in the use value of many commercial fisheries. Examples are New Zealand’s commercial fisheries which are regulated by individual transferable quotas (ITQs) (see Clark et al., 1988), and the British Columbia halibut fishery which is regulated by individual vessel quotas (see Casey et al., 1995). These gains have been achieved by creating property rights to exploit and benefit from the fishery: this is a direct response to the view that the absence of individual property rights to fish stocks leads to over-fishing in a market economy. While property rights to the use values of marine environments can be established and, in many cases, enforced at reasonable cost, this is usually not an option in the case of non-use values. Non-use values are pure public goods: if provided to one person they are provided to all, and one person’s consumption of a public good does not reduce the amount of the good available to others. It has long been recognized that a fundamental role of government is the provision of public goods such as law and order and defence. If the appropriate levels of non-use values are to be generated by marine environments it will be as a result of government regulation such as, for example, the setting and enforcing of environmental standards necessary to support viable populations (see T isdell and Hohl, 1993). International Journal of Social Economics, Vol. 24 No. 1/2/3, 1997, pp. 128-138. © MCB University Press, 0306-8293