Mass Media Reporting and Illicit Harvesting of Russian Crab: Implications for Sustainable Fishery

Existing methods of combating the shadow economy do not always give reliable results. This is particularly true for the illegal use of renewable natural resources. In some parts of the Northwest Pacific basin, illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing has become an issue of growing concern for the sustainability of resource management, ecology, and the social environment. Many factors combine to produce these harmful phenomena. The complex legal rights for shared natural marine resources, the weak capacity of state institutions, and the lack of international cooperation between exporters and importers are all relevant. These factors can be eliminated by supplementing the “traditional” analysis of the shadow economy with new data mined from the media. For the crab harvesting regions of Russia, long-lasting benefits can be achieved through improvements in governance, accountability, and public awareness, or more specifically, through extensive mass media coverage of relevant topics. We argue that in the Russian Pacific, levels of illegal crab harvesting and smuggling correlates closely to the frequency of media references. The results suggest possible applications of mass media analysis: developing additional metrics for the dynamics of shadow economies; and the formulation of effective policy recommendations for sustainable fishing.