Explaining noncompliance in the Norwegian coastal cod fishery: an application of the multinomial logit

Abstract

Establishing motive is central to the analysis of criminal behaviour. This article analyses the range of motives for noncompliant behaviour among coastal cod fishermen. A multinomial logit model is employed to analyse the reasons that underlie various motives. The four motives compared in this study are economic, technological and social and motives caused by bureaucracy and legitimacy problems. The economic motive is found to be most important for coastal fishermen. However, the cross-sectional data indicate that motives vary with fishing gear, vessel length and fishermen's age. The results indicate that identifying motives for noncompliant behaviour is not straightforward but is important for reducing the extent of infringements of the regulations. Fishermen who use gill net, seine and long line, for example, are more often motivated to noncompliance by technical problems and bureaucracy than hand-jig fishers. The study suggests that in order to prevent noncompliance behaviour, the authorities’ management policy should be designed to address the problems encountered by different categories of fishers. For example, offences that are committed because of technical problems should be resolved by increasing the involvement of fishermen in the process of drawing up regulations, whereas offences motivated by economic factors should be reduced by increasing inspections.

Acknowledgements

Suggestions by an anonymous referee have substantially improved the article. Communication with Stein Arne Rånes is greatly appreciated. The authors wish to acknowledge the financial support of the Research Council of Norway. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and are not to be attributed to the Research Council.

Notes

¹ Sutinen and Kuperan (1999), Hønneland (1999) provide an enriched theoretical introduction to the literature applied for explaining noncompliance in fishery.

² The applied outcomes are designed to cover the most likely explanations for noncompliance behaviour among Norwegian costal fishers and for securing accuracy in responses, we have formulated the motives in a wording to be well understood by the fishermen. None of the respondents failed to decide on what motivates noncompliance behaviour.

³ Choices that cannot be ranked in any way are denoted as unordered (see Amemiya, 1981).

⁴ An example of rejection of the IIA in the literature is obtained in the red bus/blue bus example, where the odds of transportation choice between car and red bus will be affected when transportation with a blue bus is added as an option. The red and blue buses are naturally close substitutes, and therefore the odds between red bus and car will be reduced, when the blue bus is added as an option (McFadden, 1974).

⁵ The Likert variable is used as a device for transforming attitudes with categories like strongly approve, approve, undecided, disapprove and strongly disapprove into quantitative variable with numeric values between 1 and 5 (Likert, 1932).

⁶ A referee suggests that a Hausman test might provide a suitable device for testing the exogeneity of the regressors. The procedure builds on the use of exogenous instruments that are correlated with the regressors without being correlated with the regressant. Unfortunately, those instruments are not at hand, which prevents us from performing the suggested test.

⁷ About 33% of the fishermen using hand jig mention that avoiding by-catch in the cod fishery is not easy, for seine and long line the percentages are 65 and 53%, respectively.

⁸ The questionnaire also reveals that periodical regulation is regarded as a problem for 29% of fishermen not using hand jig, but is regarded as a problem by only 9% of the fishermen using hand jig. On the other hand, while 27% of the hand jig fishermen mention that minimum size is an important regulatory problem, this issue is only mentioned by 7% of other fishers.

⁹ Eighty-two of the respondents operate in the counties of Finnmark, Troms and Nordland.