International Institute of Fisheries Economics & Trade
March 8, 2010
Dr. Scott began his career as a member of the faculty at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in 1954 after completing graduate work at Harvard University and the London School of Economics. With interruptions to serve in Ottawa on a royal commission staff, in Rome with the FAO, in Paris with the OECD, on the faculties at the Universities at York, Tasmania and Ottawa, and as visiting scholar at the Australian National University, Cambridge, Oxford, Chicago and Harvard, he remained on the UBC faculty until his retirement in 1989. Dr. Scott’s doctoral thesis was later published as a book entitled Natural Resources: The Economics of Conservation; a primary focus of his career has been the effects of the presence or absence of property rights, and their evolution in such natural resources as fisheries, water resources, forests and minerals, culminating in the publication of The Evolution of Resource Property Rights in 2008. He has also participated, often with Professor Albert Breton, in papers and a book on the economics of federalism. He holds honorary doctoral degrees from UBC and the University of Guelph.
In 2005, Professor Scott received a commendation from the North American Association of Fisheries Economists on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of his seminal article “The Fishery: The Objectives of Sole Ownership” in the Journal of Political Economy, in 1955. This article was called “the foundation for present day fisheries economics” in a tribute by Gordon Munro. As stated by Jim Wilen in his 2000 JEEM paper, Scott’s work “cast the then confusing notion of conservation of natural resources in terms of stewardship of assets. Scott’s ideas gave a logical and operational underpinning to conservation policy that had its intellectual roots in dynamics, capital theory, and investment.” Documentation for the Innis-Gerin award in 1987 indicated that “Dr. Scott has made lasting contributions to the study of resources and conservation, the finance of federations, fisheries economics, transfrontier pollution, benefit-cost analysis, water resources, the "brain drain", property rights, mineral economics, and constitutional reform”.
Dr. Scott gave an invited keynote plenary address at the IIFET 2010 Montpellier conference, July 13-16, 2010, in Montpellier, France, entitled “The Pedigree of Fishery Economics”, which was later published in the journal Marine Resource Economics (volume 26, 2011).