Incidence and determinants of non-fishing employment and income among fishermen in Kedah

• Main Authors: Ali, Jamal, Hassan, Sallahuddin
• Format: Monograph
• Language: English
• Published: Universiti Utara Malaysia 2007
• Subjects: HD Industries. Land use. Labor
• Online Access: http://repo.uum.edu.my/7885/1/Jam.pdf; http://repo.uum.edu.my/7885/; http://lintas.uum.edu.my:8080/elmu/index.jsp?module=webopac-l&action=fullDisplayRetriever.jsp&szMaterialNo=0000259450
• Institution: Universiti Utara Malaysia

This study look at the incidence and nature of non-fishing employment and examines the affect of fishermen characteristics, household characteristics, and the ratio of fishing income to total monthly income of household on the variance in participation of the fishermen in non-fishing employment, and to identify difference in mean income earned by fishermen who are involved in non-fishing employment with the fishermen who are only involved in the fishery related activities.The study is focused on fishermen in Kedah and is based on data collected from a survey of 207 respondents in 2006.The key findings of analyzing the first objective are: Fishermen are most likely to involve in non-fishing activities if they have short year of schooling, large family member, low horsepower boat, and low income ratio.The econometric evidence reported in this study suggest that a positive direct relationship between non-fishing activities and level of education and family size.These variables had the expected positive signs and were statistically significant in explaining the percentage of the fishermen possibility to involve in non-fishing activities.Thus, these variables play a greater role in explaining fishermen’s behavior in time allocation between fishing and non-fishing activities. The second findings shows that the average income from fishing are RM991 and from non-fishing activities only RM400 per month.The main policy implication from this study is that the government’s policy should be geared not merely increase non-fishing employment but to capitalize on the synergy between fishing and non-fishing employment.The government should continuously encourage fishermen to increase their productivity through encouraging fishermen to using more productive gears that can contribute to increasing the returns from their daily activities.