The Intended Outputs were:

Practical methods to identify and assess the potential and actual economic benefits/costs of alternative fisheries and aquatic resource research investments (including relevant environmental, social and institutional impacts) developed and promoted.

The Actual Outputs were:

The project addressed the problem by focussing on the application of economic principles in the allocation of scarce research funds to alternative possible programmes.

A review was undertaken of methods used in the renewable natural resources sector to prioritise research funding.

A second report presents a universally-applicable methodology to assist in the prioritisation of research so as to increase the contribution to economic and social welfare made by the FAR sector.

In order to be universally- applicable, the approach concentrates on the tasks that must be undertaken in order to assess the economic impact of research in the FAR sector, both on an ex-ante and an ex-post basis. The fundamental point is the over-riding need to focus on economic surplus with such an approach at least as, if not more, applicable to the case of developing countries as to developed ones.

The methodology proposed offers an obvious model for testing, which is to assess the performance of research against an economic surplus criterion. Depending on data and budgetary considerations a number of methods might be used to undertake such an assessment. The most serious issue in assessing the impact of the proposed methodology concerns time-scale.

It should be emphasised that the approach advocated here involves new concepts and perhaps new structures so that it is likely to take time to implement. Moreover, it is stressed in appendix 2 that it is the prioritisation process that is important as much as, if not more than, the results of any single round.

Due to these two issues, it may be many years before it will be possible for definitive tests of the results of the method to be carried out.

CONCLUSIONS:

The outputs of the project should help to increase the contribution made by the FAR sector to economic and social welfare by:

Helping to alter the focus of fisheries research and development from output to economic surplus.

Suggesting a prioritisation process which will enable the economic surplus generated from research funds to be increased.

There is at present no widely understood and readily available mechanism for assessing the relative priorities of competing demands for investment in fisheries research. The range of researchable problems in the sector is wide, the available funding modest, and the imperative need to target the limited funding on the most economically and socially beneficial research cannot at present be consistently achieved.

The project objective is, therefore, to provide a universally applicable methodology to assist prioritisation of research investment in the fisheries and aquatic sector.