Property rights and fishing

When we talked about economics of ecology and property rights today, it immediately made me think of Norway and our agricultural politics. We are at little country and pretty much the only reason other people know about us I because we are one of richest, if not the richest country in the world (it should be because it is amazing in general, but that’s another discussion) We have gained this status mostly because of our large coastline and the ocean that comes with it. Yes, the government taxes us heavily on pretty much everything we do or make, but still the biggest reason we are so rich is our oil. A lot of this money is being used on creating lots of public goods, like probably the best maternity law in the world ( all ladies, move to Norway a little while before you get kid, you get 10 fully paid months of), public health care and so on. The rest of the oil money, we have saved for future generations when the “oil-days” are over. But traditionally what started to make us a rich nation is our fishermen.

Norway and Norwegians loves fish, we even have a political party called the coast-party who actually has a share part of members and we have a minister of fishing and the coast that makes sure that the sea stays non-privatized. Back in the days when little was known about sustainable populations, we uses to hunt down whales likes it was our job, the populations decreases drastically and almost disappeared, the world yelled at us and we learned our lesson. So now having fish as our major long run resource (the oil will eventually run out sadly enough) we protect it carefully. We have our coastal police patrolling the coast together with the army catching illegal Russian fishermen fishing outside their territory (directly translated we call them the sneaky fishermen) and also patrolling close to shore for locals using the wrong equipment, fishing for things that are in breeding season, not grown up and other things that may lead to over harvesting of the resources in the sea.

The property rights in the sea has also been one of the major argument for many to not enter the European union, there the whole sea area is commonly known as the “European union sea” and the union give out property rights. As we have a lot a fishing resources compared to our population and are exporting most of what we are catching and the EU have scares fishing resources in their own oceans, big imports and too many fishermen’s who because of that are looking for fish in other oceans. A lot of taxes and tariffs are placed on Norwegian fish to make it harder for us to sell, but even though promises of lowering this rates if we share some of our sea territory we are still better off alone. And that is pretty much the reason we are not a part of the EU today when it comes down to a lot of things, we have so much money (and fish) that staying on the outside makes us better off.