1. Introduction
Marine fishery is an important component of the marine industry, and it has an important impact on the economic and social development of coastal areas [
1], involved in marine environment and sustainable development. For a long time, the marine fishery industry has had a single structure, and it has remained at a primary stage for a long time. The fluctuation range of the vulnerability of the industrial ecosystem has gradually increased, and the coastal areas are facing comprehensive problems of sustainable development [
2]. With the limited reproduction and regeneration capacity of its marine fishery resources, coastal waters show the trend of overfishing, a decline in fishery resources, and the deterioration of its coastal ecological environment [
3]. The desertification of fishing grounds, such as the disappearance of offshore fishing seasons and even the lack of fish due to overfishing and habitat destruction, has become a focus [
4]. Fishing technology, fishing intensity, and fishery industry structure have gradually become important factors that affect the sustainable utilization of marine fishery resources [
5].
As the fishery industry has developed, the primary industry has always accounted for an absolute proportion, amounting to about 50% of the total output value. The secondary industry and the tertiary industry have similar development levels. The overall economic efficiency of marine fishery is low, and its development speed is relatively slow [
6]. The rationalization of the marine fishery industry structure has a significant “smoothing effect” on the marine fishery economic fluctuations [
7]. It is dominated by the primary industry; the development of the secondary and tertiary industries is lagging. The situation is urgent, and it needs to be improved. As it changes from the current extensive mode of relying on the high input of factors to the new intensive mode driven by efficiency, giving full play to resource endowment and improving the efficiency of the fishery economy is the key direction for fishery development in the future [
8]. How environmental regulation affects factor allocation is becoming an emerging hot topic [
9]. Government regulation has a positive and significant impact on the green production behavior of the marine fishery industry [
10], and it often uses environmental policy to induce green investment [
11]. Although a series of special measures for the governance of offshore fishery resources have been successively introduced, on the whole, this has not solved the long-standing imbalance between “too many input elements” and “too much output.” The unreasonable structure of the fishery industry is inseparably related to the distortion of the factor market. The distortion of the factor market makes it difficult for factors to be freely allocated among various industries according to market laws, and this directly leads to the Pareto inefficiency of factor allocation [
12,
13]. There is a significant negative impact on the improvement of production efficiency [
13,
14], and different industries have different benefits from factor distortion.
In the existing literature, the research on factor market distortion is basically carried out from the perspective of labor factors, capital factors, and technological factors. In terms of the labor factor market, under the ideal conditions of a perfectly competitive market, the equilibrium wage of laborers is determined by the marginal productivity of labor [
15], but in reality, the two may be unequal, resulting in labor market distortions. In the capital factor market, when the benchmark interest rate deviates from the market interest rate, the market is considered to be distorted. In terms of technical efficiency, innovative research and development as well as technological progress have a considerable impact on the productivity of enterprises [
16]. The improvement of technical efficiency has led to the growth of the total factor productivity, and this is the main reason for the productivity differences across regions [
17].
Most of the existing studies focus on the discussion of capital, land, and labor factors and focus less on natural resources and institutional factors—and even less on the impact on the internal structure of a certain industry. There are few studies on the impact mechanism and action path of the adjustment of the marine fishery industry structure based on the perspective of factor market distortion. Some relevant studies have the following problems: first, the research perspective is focused on the impact of a single factor or several factors on the development of marine fisheries; second, the research on the relationship between factor input and the optimal development of marine fisheries mostly stays at the level of theoretical analysis, while the research on the direct relationship between factor market distortion and the industrial structure of marine fisheries is less studied, especially the quantitative and empirical research are lacking; third, it is necessary to attach importance to the research on the increase of the quantity or quality of the factors, and pay little attention to the impact of the factor allocation effect on the industrial development.
Since it is based on the current development and upgrading of the marine fishery industry, this paper uses industry macro data to measure the degree of market factor price distortion, and it constructs a Moore-like index and a simplified industrial structure upgrade index. Based on the qualitative comparative analysis of fsQCA fuzzy sets, this paper studies the impact of factor market distortion on the fishery industry structure. An examination of the influence of factor distortion on industrial structure upgrading under different circumstances is a helpful tool in better understanding the influence of factor distortion on industrial structure and in providing a reference for how to carry out the market-oriented reform of factors in order to promote the development of industrial structure.
The rest of this paper proposes the analysis method and a logical framework that measures the distortion degree of marine fishery industry factors and an industrial structure index, analyzes the impact of factor market distortion on the fishery industry structure by using the qualitative comparative analysis method of fsQCA, and explains the conclusions of the fsQCA analysis based on the current situation of factor market distortion in the marine fishery industry. The paper finally summarizes and puts forward relevant countermeasures and suggestions.
The possible marginal contribution of this paper is that the analysis and selection of factor market distortion in the existing research are mostly limited to the two factors of capital and labor. In combination with the actual situation of the marine fishery industry, we have expanded the interpretation scope of factor market distortion and revealed the micro mechanism and macro transmission mechanism of the relationship between factor market distortion and the optimization and upgrading of the marine fishery industry from the theoretical level. We have explored and constructed an index model to comprehensively evaluate the market distortion of marine fishery factors and the optimization and upgrading of the marine fishery industry, which provides effective support for subsequent research and analysis.
4. Explanations Based on Empirical Analysis
The fsQCA method has effectively identified multiple paths affecting the structural adjustment of the marine fishery industry, indicating that the factors that affect the structural adjustment of the marine fishery industry have the same outcome and multiple concurrencies [
21]. Among them, each path to accelerating the structural upgrading of the marine fishery industry can be uniformly summarized as the mode of “highly consistent distortion of the factor market”; that is, when all factors are highly distorted or lowly distorted at the same time, the faster the upgrading of the marine fishery industry structure will be. The situation has played the role of “reversely forcing upgrade” and “promoting upgrade.” The paths to accelerate the upgrading of the marine fishery industry structure can be summarized into two modes: the “one low and one high” mode and the “two lows” lag mode. The former refers to the distortion of the low capital factor and high labor factor or the high marine fishery resources factor. The latter refers to the combined effect of low labor factor distortion and low marine fishery resource factor distortion. In general, capital factors play a crucial role in the process of upgrading the marine fishery industry structure, and there is a joint effect between labor and fishery resources.
4.1. Influence of Capital Factors and Its Status Quo of Distortion
At the macro level, China’s capital market has the typical characteristics of financial repression [
32]; at the micro level, improving capital allocation efficiency or eliminating capital market distortions can significantly increase the total factor productivity [
13,
33]. The development of any industry is inseparable from the investment of capital. The investment in fixed assets of fisheries increases year by year, but the main source is self-raised funds and other funds. The dependence of fishery capital on domestic loans is very low, and it is declining year by year. For a long time, the source of funds for state-owned fishery enterprises has mainly relied on state-owned banks, while collective and private fishery enterprises have borrowed from commercial banks and credit cooperatives. The difficulty of obtaining fishery credit capital between state-owned and private fishery enterprises is different, and this has caused the price distortion of fishery capital to a certain extent. China’s financial system also has strict controls on the fishery capital market, such as restrictions on the establishment of banks by private fishery enterprises and control of the scale of fishery credit which, to a certain extent, promotes the distortion of fishery capital prices.
The root of the problem in the marine fishery industry is that fish is a public resource. If there is no economic incentive to ensure that the value of the fish resource is not compromised, then fishermen will overfish. In order to solve this problem and to improve the fishery industry structure at the same time, the government has increased its capital investment in fisheries, and it has successively revised and promulgated the Fisheries Law of the People’s Republic of China, Fishery Development Plan and Development Plan for Aquaculture Area for Exporting Aquatic Product. At the same time, after joining the WTO, the total amount of subsidies for the fishery industry has been continuously increased. However, compared with the subsidies for the farming industry, the number of fishery subsidies is still relatively small, and the total input is insufficient. In addition, the types of fishery subsidies are not rich enough to meet the actual needs of fishermen, and the types of indirect subsidies are more than those of direct subsidies. Therefore, the current investment of fishery subsidies cannot meet the status quo of marine fishery development. This is not beneficial to the upgrading of the fishery industry’s structure. Compared with other industries, fisheries are a high-risk industry. As offshore operations are affected by uncertain factors such as weather, it is difficult to form economies of scale, and the gross profit of the fishery industry is relatively low. The government’s innovative requirements for fisheries and the continuous attack and rejection of distant-water fisheries by social capital, bank capital, and securities capital have made the contradiction between supply and demand of funds in the development of fisheries increasingly prominent.
4.2. Influence of Labor Factors and Its Status Quo of Distortion
Under the ideal conditions of a perfectly competitive market, the equilibrium wage of workers is determined by the marginal productivity of labor, but in the real economy, the two may be unequal, and the labor market will experience market distortions that deviate from the ideal state. In the case of market segmentation, there is a phenomenon that labor cannot flow freely, resulting in different wages for the same labor in the market, and even high-quality labor cannot obtain matching wages in the market [
34]. It also has a situation of labor market distortion. When workers are in a weak position due to information asymmetry or an imperfect labor market, the labor market will have negative distortions in which workers’ wages are lower than the equilibrium level; this negative distortion is also the main cause of the macroeconomic imbalance [
35]. The government’s distorted policy of artificially separating the urban and rural labor markets is also an important reason for the growing income gap [
36].
In recent years, the number of fishery practitioners has gradually decreased, some traditional marine fishermen changed their profession and turned to other related industries [
37]. First, due to overfishing, the state has called for fishery practitioners to switch to other industries. Second, under the market economy system, the level of mechanization in the development of the fishery industry has increased, and labor is being deployed by the market to other industries. Among the fishery employees, the number of people engaged in marine fisheries accounts for 28.21%, of which the number of personnel engaged in marine fishing and marine aquaculture accounts for 82.30% of the professional employees in marine fisheries, and the proportion of the labor force engaged in the secondary and tertiary industries only accounts for 17.70% of the fishery professional practitioners. From the perspective of educational background, due to the particularity and history of marine fishery occupations, practitioners, especially fishery laborers engaged in marine fishing, generally have a low level of education, and it is difficult to improve this significantly in a short time [
38]. In response to the low overall education level of the marine fishery labor force, although the Ministry of Agriculture has given a series of access conditions for marine fishery employment, the following problems still exist in specific production: the number of crew members does not match the number of existing fishing vessels; since the working staff on the boat is generally poorly educated and the situation cannot be significantly improved for a while, it is difficult for them to be promoted to positions of real professional crew members, and many of them work without qualifications or with false qualifications. Because the contribution rate of the fishery wage income to the total family income is low, many well educated young people are choosing industries with higher wages rather than returning to fishing where wages are lower.
4.3. The Influence and Distortion of Fishery Resource Elements
The output of marine products is mainly composed of the output of marine fishing and the output of mariculture. Before 2006, the output of marine fishing was always higher than the output of mariculture. In 2006, the output of mariculture in China exceeded the output of marine fishing for the first time. Since then, mariculture production has always been higher than marine capture production, and the gap has widened.
While fishery production has achieved rapid development, the marine ecological environment and fishery resources have also been severely damaged. The number and the power of fishing boats have increased, but the economic benefits have been declining. Traditional economic fish resources have been continuously destroyed, and the phenomenon of substitution between fish populations has become increasingly serious. High-quality traditional catches are replaced by low-quality secondary catches, and the ratio of the two types of catches has reversed. The distribution density of the original commercial fish stocks has also changed a lot, and the decline of fish resources in the middle and low layers as well as near the bottom layer is the most serious. In addition, the destruction of the living environment leads to the decline in the reproductive capacity of fishery resources, mainly due to the discharge of land-based pollutants, ship pollution, and unreasonable construction in marine engineering [
39].
In response to the destruction of the marine ecological environment, the sharp drop in the output of aquatic products, and the serious decline of fishery resources, the government has successively introduced relevant policies such as “dual control”, “value-added release”, “fishing suspension during seasonal periods”, “zero growth”, “reduction of boats”, “marine protected areas”, and “marine pastures”, which have alleviated the problem of the decline of fishery resources to a certain extent. They have also played a regulating role in the marine ecological environment, but almost every policy has shortcomings, and the contradiction between limited fishery resources and overfishing has not been truly resolved.
There is an interactive relationship between factor prices and industrial structure [
40]. The distortion of factor markets has a significant inhibitory effect on the upgrading of industrial structure, and the effects of price distortions of labor, capital, resources, and other factors are different [
41]. In the marine fishery industry, labor market distortion has a greater impact than capital and resource market distortion [
42]. A distorted factor market leads to a distorted factor price relationship. The input remains unchanged. If the distortion of the factor market is eliminated, the total output will increase significantly [
43]. The supply structure reform of the marine fishery is one of the sustainable development trends of marine fisheries [
44].
5. Discussions and Implementations
Adjusting the distortion degree of the factor market to optimize the marine fishery industry structure is an effective measure in reducing the vulnerability of China’s marine fishery industry ecosystem. Reversing the negative relationship between fishermen’s professional level and efficiency will help optimize the marine fishery industry structure and will enhance the industrial economic value. Therefore, this study puts forward the following three suggestions for the development of the marine fishery industry.
5.1. Improve the Quality of Labor Factors
According to the 2020 China Fishery Statistics Yearbook, about 88.23% of the fishery workers are engaged in the primary industry of fishing and aquaculture, and only 11.77% of the fishery professionals are engaged in secondary and tertiary industries. From the perspective of educational structure, the educational level of fishery workers is low, especially among the fishery labor force engaged in marine fishing. There are few crew members who have received both high school and vocational high school education or above. Therefore, one of the prerequisites for the rational allocation of labor force elements is to improve the education level of fishery employees, thus making them able to adapt to modern fisheries and to transform from traditional fisheries to modern fisheries so as to promote the adjustment of the fishery industrial structure from the primary industry to the secondary and tertiary industries.
5.2. Reasonably Allocate Capital Elements
The capital allocation in the fishery market is not balanced. The funds needed by enterprises generally come from loans. Most enterprises borrow from banks. Because banks are worried about risks, they will increase financing for enterprises with stable returns and low risks, and they will be cautious in financing high-leverage and high-risk companies. However, more often than not, such highly leveraged, high-risk businesses can generate higher productivity, which can lead to capital mismatches. Therefore, the rational allocation of capital elements and increased support for secondary and tertiary industry enterprises are also particularly important for the optimization of industrial structure.
5.3. Strengthen the Management of Marine Resource Elements
Many countries are rich in marine fishery resources. The pelagic fishery model, which is restricted by factors such as its management system, industrial scale, and lack of effective fishery policy guarantee, currently accounts for a small proportion of the entire fishery industry, so there is still a lot of room for development. It is of great significance to increase investment in scientific research and development in order to promote scientific and technological support for fishery development and to use advanced technology to improve the development and utilization of fishery resources. The core concept of Industry 4.0 is to integrate advanced information technologies [
45]. The Internet of Things (IoT) and blockchain have made great progress [
46,
47], and 5G or 6G will present us with the ability to establish full coverage of the “air–space–sea–land” system and to integrate [
48]. All the above technologies related to quantum computers are potential for improving and changing the management of marine resource elements in many aspects [
49]. At the same time, the elements of marine resources and recreational fisheries can be integrated to further optimize the structure of the fishery industry and to promote the sustainable development of marine fisheries.
6. Conclusions, Limitations, and Implications
6.1. Conclusions
We focused on the marine environment and sustainable development of the fishery industry in this study. By reviewing the research on the distortion of labor, capital, and technology factors and by combining the development and the upgrading status of the marine fishery industry, we used industry macro data to measure the distortion of market factor prices. We built a Moore-like index and a simplified industrial structure upgrading index. Moreover, based on the qualitative comparative analysis of fsQCA fuzzy set, we further studied the impact of factor market distortion on the industrial structure of fisheries.
6.2. Limitations
In this paper, the marginal role of each factor in the development of the marine fishery industry, the causes of distortion, and the deeper impact mechanism, including the interaction between factors, need further study. Future research can be carried out from the following aspects: (1) theoretically and empirically analyze the marginal role of each factor in the different stages of the development of the marine fishery industry; (2) further summarize the causes of distortion in the factor market; (3) study the interaction between various elements; (4) try to further improve the comprehensive evaluation method and index system, and more accurately measure the distortion level of the factor market and the characteristics of the optimization and upgrading of the marine fishery industry.
6.3. Implications
In combination with the current situation of the development of the marine fishery industry and the degree of distortion in the factor market price, we put forward the following suggestions from the aspects of labor factors, capital factors, fishery resources factors, industrial structure, and other aspects: (1) improve the quality of labor factors, improve the violation cost of fishery operators, conduct regular training for fishery practitioners, and establish a complete crew wage guarantee system; (2) strengthen the management of marine resources’ elements, refine the regional division system of fishery resources, regulate the catch after the end of the fishing moratorium, and improve the utilization rate of fishery resources; (3) rationally allocate capital elements, increase the total amount of subsidies to fisheries, and broaden the financing channels for fisheries; (4) learn from foreign experience to further optimize the industrial structure, vigorously develop recreational fisheries, and improve scientific and technological productivity and specialization.