Evolution of user rights quality in the Icelandic fisheries

User rights in fisheries refer to the rights of fishers to harvest from fish resources. In terms of exclusivity, security, duration and transferability these rights can be strong or they can be weak. For this a definition of and a measure of the strength of user rights is needed. We refer to strong and weak user rights, and by strong user rights in fisheries (SURFs), we mean fishing rights that score highly on the quality of property rights, or property rights quality index (Q-measure), which be explain in the paper. Weak user rights are fishing rights that score low on the quality of property rights. We then explain how this approach can be applied to analyze and score the quality of actual user rights in fisheries. This we do first by relating the characteristics or attributes of property rights to harvesting rights or vessel quota systems in fisheries and we look at the case of Iceland which implemented an individual transferable quota system (ITQs) in its fisheries in the latter half of the 20th century. We recount the story of the implementation and score the different property rights attributes. We then relate this to the change in performance of the fisheries by comparing the quality score to the value of the fishing quotas, and indirectly to the profitability of the fisheries. It turns out that there is a high correlation between the quality score and the value of the quotas.