
By Dan Holland, Alaska Fisheries Science Center, (US) National Marine Fisheries Service
[Editor's note: This article has been adapted by MPA News from a presentation given by Dan Holland on 7 July 2000 at the "Economics of MPAs" conference in Vancouver, BC, Canada. Holland is an economist.]
Whatever its objectives, the function of an MPA is to change (or preempt) the distribution of fishing effort in space, time, and possibly across species. The relevant question is whether the new distribution of effort will be superior to the current one and why.