Convergence Anatomization of Aquaculture Production in Leading Fish-Producing Countries During the Period of 1997-2013

Introduction

The dynamic scenario of the increasing or decreasing gap between rich and poor countries in terms of availability or production of any commodity, catching-up or deviation from catching-up effect, is discernable by convergence analysis - rising or falling gap leads us to grasp whether inequality across the countries rises or vice versa. In Economic Science, the convergence analysis, as the existing literatures show, is done mostly for the economic indicators like gross domestic product in total or per capita terms, capital formation, households’ consumption expenditure, carbon emissions, life expectancy, education infrastructures, green indicators (Barro 1991; Wolff 1991; Mankiw et al 1992; Quah 1993; Boyale & McCarthy 1997; Ghosh et al 1998; Barro & Sala-i-Martin 2004; Borkowski et al 2008; Nayyar 2008; Kumar 2008; Das 2013; Domazet et al 2012; Piketty 2014; Ray et al 2016; Das et al 2016) among others; however, the analysis of the same issue in light with production of aquaculture is hard to find as empirical evidences among the countries or regions of the world. The present paper has, thus, taken up this issue for cross country convergence anatomization.

Fish industry generates outputs in almost all the countries depending on availability of water resources in different forms like inland water, saline water, brackish water and its growth rates over time cannot be denied in view of catching-up effect, despite the fact that aquatic element like fish occupies very small space in the domain of agriculture in developed nations in particular. In contrast, fish and allied products are assumed to be major items in developing nations so far as volume of economic activities in terms of value additions to national output are concerned. Decomposition of entire agricultural income of developed and developing nations could explore the relative importance of income generated from fish and aquatic species. In the present context fish and aquatic species are considered as major output in the developing nations so far as absolute annual production is concerned which is not true for the so called developed nations. In absolute terms, primary observation reveals that the so called industrially developed nations, on an average, are poor in producing fish output compared to global share whereas developing nations contributing considerable amount to their gross domestic products (GDP) accounts so far as global fish output is concerned.