Economic indices for the North Pacific Groundfish Fisheries:
Calculation and visualization
Abstract
This report details the methods used to create indices for monitoring economic performance in the Alaskan North Pacific Groundfish Fisheries published in the annual Economic Status of the Groundfish Fisheries off Alaska report. The intuition and interpretation of the indices is discussed followed by a review of the formal literature on the technical properties of indices and the methods for their construction.
A decomposition of the Fisher Index is derived which relates sub-indices to a larger aggregate index. The derivations are extended to chained indices over time. A case study of the Gulf of Alaska shoreside groundfish fishery is used to show how the indices and supporting statistics can be graphically displayed to efficiently characterize significant amounts of data across different dimensions of economic markets.
