Chapter 10 - Reporting on subsidies

10.1. The study report

In this last chapter of the Guide, we will briefly review some aspects with regard to reporting on fisheries subsidies. Examples and suggestion for how to organize the information collected and our results have already been included in different parts of the Guide, e.g. Figure 6 and Figure 9 on listing fisheries subsidies, chapter 7 on making an inventory of the fisheries industry and on costs and earnings analyses, and chapter 9 on descriptions of fisheries subsidies.

If our fisheries subsidies study is being carried out on the request from, for example, a government authority with a particular objective and terms of reference, or it is part of larger research task, we may already have an outline for how our report should look like. If this is not the case, the suggested outline in Table 3 may give some useful ideas.

It is recommended that we put most our efforts into chapter 4 "Presentation of results". It should be remembered that chapters 2 and 3 are not meant to be the core of the report and even though it is usually relatively easy to include a large amount of interesting information here, they are better kept to a minimum of issues, necessary for giving the context and framework of the subsidy identification and assessments. If we want to include more details, on, for example, the results of the institutional survey or the fisheries sector review, this may be better done in an appendix.

TABLE 3
Tentative outline for the final report of a fisheries subsidies study

The exact subchapters to include in chapter 4, "Presentation of results", will of course depend on the scope of our study but, most likely, a substantial part of the report will be on the "Description and assessment of subsidies". Here we may want to present our findings in a summary listing (see Figure 6 and Figure 9) in addition to giving descriptions of the subsidies as well as explanations regarding the assumptions made for their assessment in the text. We may opt for including additional information on the subsidies (according to Table 2) and more details on the methodologies in an appendix to the report.

10.2. Fisheries subsidies study conventions

In section 4.2 where the context of the Guide's subsidy definition was discussed, we noted that there is a lack of international standards and benchmarks to use for identifying and assessing subsidies in the fisheries sector. This shortcoming makes international analyses of subsidies difficult. Nonetheless, as was later discussed in section 5.6, international practice appears to move in a direction towards an increased general acceptance of a broader subsidies concept and the issue is widely discussed. Still, much more work is needed if we want to advance our knowledge on fisheries subsidies. This Guide is provided as a tool to help us in this work. It is, however, in many respects quite an open-ended document and leaves many decisions to the user. In the FAO Expert Consultation held in December 2002, discussing the draft Guide, it was agreed that a number of minimum reporting requirements should be formulated in order to try to steer international work on subsidies in the same direction and hence improve the collective resultats of the efforts. The following "conventions" on reporting practices were discussed and agreed on in the meeting for the consideration of governments conducting fisheries subsidies studies (FAO 2002):

• First convention: specify geographical and subsector scope of the study.

• Second convention: specify the criteria used in identifying the presence of a subsidy.

• Third convention: specify the benchmarks used to identify interest and tax-rebates and similar measures.

• Fourth convention: specify the allocation keys used for joint subsidies included in the study.

• Fifth convention: specify if the "opportunity cost" for direct financial transfers has been included as a cost to the provider.

• Sixth convention: the industry value of financial transfers should be based on the actual government expenditure - depreciated over time if applicable - and the financial cost the industry has avoided by receiving the transfer.

• Seventh convention: goods and services provided to a recipient are considered to have a value corresponding to the difference between what the recipient should have paid for the equivalent goods and/or services if provided in the market and what he/she in fact paid to the public provider.

Accordingly, the Guide recommends adhering to these conventions when reporting on fisheries subsidies.

10.3. Summary of the guide

Fisheries subsidies studies can have different objectives and scopes and thus consist of different components. In this Guide, we have discussed those that are felt to be the most important ones. It is of course up to the user of the Guide to decide which parts of the Guide that are most relevant to his or her particular study. Figure 10 summarizes the different components as they have been presented in the Guide and stresses the importance of collecting information both from the public sector and the fisheries industry.