Impacts of vessel capacity reduction programs on the efficiency in fisheries. The case of Australia's multispecies in northern prawn fishery

Capacity reduction programs in the form of buybacks or decommissioning programs have had relatively widespread application in fisheries in the US, Europe and Australia. A common criticism of such programs is that they remove the least efficient vessels first, resulting in an increase in average efficiency of the remaining fleet. The effective fishing power of the fleet, therefore, does not decrease in proportion to the number of vessels removed. Further, reduced crowding may increase efficiency of the remaining vessels. In this paper, the effects of a buyback program on average technical efficiency in Australia’s Northern Prawn Fishery are examined using a multi-output distance function approach with an explicit inefficiency model. The results indicate that average efficiency of the remaining vessels was greater than that of the removed vessels, and that average efficiency of remaining vessels also increased as a result of reduced crowding.

Business Process Data Compliance

Most approaches to business process compliance are restricted to the analysis of the structure of processes. It has been argued that full regulatory compliance requires information on not only the structure of processes but also on what the tasks in a process do. To this end Governatori and Sadiq[2007] proposed to extend business processes with semantic annotations. We propose a methodology to automatically extract one kind of such annotations; in particular the annotations related to the data schema and templates linked to the various tasks in a business process.