摘要：This paper is a study of the pro duction technology and relative e.ciency of vessels harvesting banana and tiger prawns in the Northern Prawn Fish- ery (NPF), one of Australia's largest and most lucrative fishing areas. It is based on an unbalanced panel data set of 226 observations among thirty- seven vessels for the years 1990—1996 and employs a technique which specifies a stochastic frontier production function in order to decompose the variation among vessels in the harvest of prawns due to unbounded random e.ects be- yond firm control from those that result in di.erences in technical ine.ciency among fishing vessels in the industry. In other words, variations in maximum exp ected output can o ccur either as a result of stochastic e.ects (e.g., good and bad weather states), or from the fact that vessels in the industry may be operating at various levels of ine.ciency due to mismanagement, po or incentive structures, less than perfectly competitive behaviour or inappro- priate input levels or combinations. Estimation of this output frontier also provides key information on the relative importance of inputs in the produc- tion of banana and tiger prawns, output elasticities, returns to scale, possible variations in stock size and the economic performance of each fishing vessel, year to year.
