Estimating Technical Efficiency on Saudi Arabia Fishing Methods: A Case Study of the Red Sea

The Red Sea is one of the major fisheries for fish production in Saudi Arabia, where production represented 28.42% of the total fish production (90 thousand tons) in 2012. Despite the expand of water area and increase the number of fishers and boats (traditional and industrial) fishing in the Red Sea, but the fish production was decreased from 31.05 tons in 1988 to 25.56 thousand tons in 2012. This indicates the existence of deficiencies in the use of mechanical strength and quantity economic resources of fish available fisheries in the Sea Red. We used Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) (which is a linear programming method of non-parametric), to estimate the technical efficiency of fishing methods (Trollins, Gillnet, and Traps) in the Red Sea and the impact of achieving optimum technical efficiency of fish production in the Red Sea.