Abstract
This study is to estimate the recent changes in total factor productivity of 15 Korean adjacent water fisheries based on Malmquist productivity indices. The study adopted both input and output oriented productivity measures utilizing a hyperbola distance function. In addition to this point, the study also calculated the 95% confidence interval for the various components of the productivities in order to access the statistical significance of estimates using 2000 times of re-sampling process through the smoothed bootstraping. The results of the study showed us that there was 18% reduction in the overall total factor productivity during the study period from 2007 to 2011, which turned out to be 5% of annual decrease in productivity. The study found that the main reason of this decrease in total productivity is about 22% downward shift of a fisheries production function due to recent conditions of a devastated fishing ground. When we evaluated the statistical significance of changes in technical efficiency combining both pure technical and scale efficiency based on the 95% confidence intervals, we could not find any evidence of changes in those components of total factor productivity. When we accessed the productivity of the each of 15 adjacent water fisheries methods, only the large danish seine fisheries showed us about 7% increase in productivity. Even though the large trawling and the large tow-boat trawling revealed no changes in productivity, all of the other 12 fisheries suffered the decreases in productivities.