Wage Labor and Economic Diversification in Small Scale Fishing

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

This award to East Carolina University will allow a team of researchers to study small scale fishermen in Puerto Rico. They hypothesize that different degrees of involvement in wage labor will result in different levels of diversification, investment, and capital formation among fishing households. The cognitive orientation of the fishermen will be analyzed to see how it constrains their choices among economic alternatives. The project will interview about 200 randomly selected fishing households to get basic census ecological and economic data. Smaller subsamples will be selected for the collection of judged similarity data that will be analyzed by various multivariate techniques to elicit the underlying cognitive structure. This project is important because since WWII the world has seen a sharpening of the international division of labor, with underdeveloped countries experiencing a growing working class. The economic activities of small scale proletarians in such societies are important in the overall economy, yet we know little about them. The effects of these economic activities in the local economy, and their impact on the tropical marine environments are important topics that this research will help us to understand.