Influence of Fishery Subsidies on Fishing: Empirical Test Based on China’s Provincial Panel Data

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The topic of fishery subsidies is in the spotlight because of the negotiations about them on the global scale and China is already emphasized as the country with significant harmful fisheries subsidies. There is a lack of use of recent data and information on this topic in your paper, i.e. it would be interesting to put your data in a somewhat broader context (for example, see papers Broadening the global debate on harmful fisheries subsidies through the use of subsidy intensity metrics by Skerritt and Sumaila, 2021; or A 20-year retrospective on the provision of fisheries subsidies in the European Union by Skerritt et al., 2020). Due to the complex interplay of the various environmental, social and economic impacts of fishery subsidies, the use of mathematical models is sometimes ungrateful because it is impossible to include all factors. So be aware of this when interpreting the results.

There are a large number of errors in the text, typos, wrong uppercase/lowercase letters, punctuation marks through the paper (lines 20, 49, 52, 70, 74, 104, 136, 147, 188, 192, 193, 207...), so carefully check everything.

Author Response

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Reviewer 2 Report

Fishermen can be replaced with Fishers

Rewrite lines 19-20 – failed to understand the flow of the sentences

Research questions are missing in the introduction part.

The results section is too short. Can be extended

Research gaps and limitation of the present study is missing in the discussion section.

English Edit is a must.

Author Response

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Reviewer 3 Report

This article examines the connection between fishery subsidies and fishery production, arguing that in the case of China, the provision of subsidies resulted in a decrease in production in both coastal and inland areas, though the effect is more pronounced in inland areas.

This paper is examining a topic that is important and timely, especially given the current WTO negotiations that are underway, however it would benefit from some improvements as detailed below.

The main substantive issue with the paper concerns the data used for subsidies. The data on fishery subsidies in the China Fishery Statistical Yearbook series are not exhaustive and they are not sub-categorized to a level of specificity that makes it possible to accurately assess impact. The subsidies data that the researchers rely on only include the payments given to fishery households—the data do not include subsidies given to fishing enterprises for example, which are substantial. The data also do not include some government programs like ecological restoration, for example.

Also, not all the data reported as subsidies from this source should necessarily be included in the analysis. The social relief and policy subsidies are not fisheries-specific, meaning they are also provided to other rural/poor households that are not engaged in fishing activities (these are known as “horizontal subsidies”) and should not be included because they are given to those outside of fisheries (the subsidies have an impact that is broader than just fisheries, and thus it is hard to isolate this impact—they aren’t included in the WTO fisheries negotiations either). And of the agriculture production subsidies , only the fishery subsidies should be considered for the same reason—the general agriculture production subsidies are not fisheries-specific.

The fishery subsidies themselves are not subcategorized into individual programs, so we don’t know what proportion of them are capture fisheries versus aquaculture, or beneficial versus harmful (capacity-enhancing) subsidies. The concerns about the impact from subsidies are different for capture fisheries versus aquaculture—it would make sense that increased subsidies would lead to an increase in aquaculture production to a certain point, but overfishing isn’t a concern as much as it is for capture fisheries.

 

All of these details about the data, including definitions of terms etc., need to be understood in order to truly capture the effect that the authors are trying to show. The authors will need to account for any limitations to the data in order to convincingly argue the connection they are presenting. Key terms, policies, and sources should also be provided in Chinese characters so other researchers can build upon this work and the gap between the two language/research worlds is bridged.

In terms of the methodology, the model overall seems to make sense, however one important variable that should be taken into consideration is catch per unit effort (CPUE) because it is possible that an increase in fishing effort due to subsidies is greater in proportion to unit of catch compared to previous times (pre-subsidies), and thus the impact on the resources would be masked. In Lines 231-233 the authors say that the subsidies led to reduced fishery catch production, but the explanation could also be a real decrease in resources.

Another element that would help our understanding of the dynamic is any data on stock availability (fishery-independent data) because catch data are fishery-dependent and don’t necessarily capture the extent of the available stock or any natural variations in the resource.

Overall, the paper is generally well-referenced, though sources for the yearbooks should be included. Also, it looks like some of the sources are originally in Chinese. If so, the Chinese characters should be provided for the author name(s) and titles/journal names so they can be easily found by others.

Some of the language/wording could be improved. There are some incomplete sentences and typos, and some English usage that could be improved. For example, Lines 17-18: Consider word choice when saying “fishery subsidies have a negative impact on fishery catch production”. This could be read as subsidies are detrimental to catch production. Consider being more mathematically precise by saying “fishery subsidies are negatively correlated with fishery catch production”.

Some specific comments are below:

 

Line 12: “documents” don’t believe things, people do! Consider changing to “experts” or “stakeholders”

 

Lines 19-20: “Continuous development.” Not a sentence

 

Lines 38-39 and 40-41: change “my country” to “China”. “my country” makes sense in Chinese, but it could be confusing in English for an international audience.

 

Line 41: spacing around [6]

 

Line 48: spacing around [10]

 

Line 49: spacing in 94%

 

Line 52-53: Fix end of sentence and reference [12]. Is this sentence supposed to be connected to the next sentence fragment?

 

Line 54: change “increase in fishery fishing activities” to “increase in fishing activity”. (By “fishery fishing,” do the authors mean “capture fisheries” maybe?? Otherwise the term sounds redundant.)

 

Line 74-75: fix end of sentence

 

In section 2 (e.g., line 90): briefly explain the primary, secondary and tertiary sectors of industrialization for anyone who may not know these terms

 

Line 78: maybe instead of “the explained variables” say “dependent variable”? And “independent variables” for explanatory variables?

 

Line 96: change “except” to “aside from”

 

Line 179: don’t start sentence with number, say instead “In Table 2, (1) and (2) are …”

 

Lines 192-193: Incomplete sentence (beginning with “Of the capital”)

 

Lines 288-292: The language in these sentences is confusing.

 

Lines 297-298: Incompetely sentence (beginning with “Improve”)

 

Lines 302-305: this is also confusing. What do the authors mean by “the fishery catch production in the region has a negative impact”? On what?  Do you mean “is negatively impacted”? Again here I would put this in clearer mathematical terms—are you talking about a negative correlation? With what?

 

Lines 306-311: Please elaborate here. What do you mean by the subsidy policy being adjusted blindly? What would that look like? Can you say more about what “a planned way” would look like?

Author Response

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Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear authors, thank you for the effort while revising your manuscript. This time, while reading new version, the term 'fishery fishing' caught my eye - why don't you use just fishery? Moreover, still found some errors in the text (i.e. lines 78-87...).

Author Response

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Reviewer 2 Report

The authors incorporated the reviewer comments and the article is in good condition. Minor English editing is needed before the further processing

Author Response

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