Elements sur les interventions financieres de l'etat dans le secteur des peches artisanales

The State's main lines of action in the maritime fishing sector are not at all specific. They aim to define, among others, the regulation of relations among the different actors within the sector as well as the technical and administrative methods of management (Wehrin H, 1987). In terms of halieutic resources, the European Community has partially taken the place of state power to set, in particular, rules of management and exploitation of the stocks. The TAC and quotas, keys of resource distribution, and the market policy set up through producer organisations, are indications of this substitution in progress. The recent request coming from the European Community for reducing the fishing effort is witness as well of this transfer in progress (decision of the Commission to reduce the overall capacity of the French fleet in use to close to 3% in power on the basis of the status of 1983). Technical and administrative management is also undergoing in a partial way this drift towards a European centralisation, even if each State maintains alongside the community framework its own technical and administrative framework (the State remains responsible, for example, for correct implementation of Multi-Year Orientation Programmes). As for the financial duties of the State, they take the traditional paths of the budget, to wit, taxation and public assistance. In small-scale fishing, the emergence of a system of taxation on real revenue is a recent phenomenon. The tax basis, applied tax rates and the authorised deductions are such that currently we still cannot detect any impact on either capital management or investment motivation (Catanzano et al, 1988). Implementation of these systems by replacing a fixed method of taxation shows perhaps more a governmental will to improve awareness of the sector than an ambition to reduce in the short term the sector's budgetary imbalance. Investment support, fourth interventionist role of the State that we discuss here, is certainly the most present in the mind of the individuals, actors or outsiders to the sector, and this for several reasons: - first, it concerns the use of public financial resources and in that regard it interests the entire economic and social world; - next, it is often assumed that it compensates for social imbalances and/or encourages the search for the efficiency of a sector and therefore it sensitises not only the sector's actors but also consumers. - moreover, it is also, in the same way as the duties previously referred to, elicited by means of decentralisation or transfer effect to supra-national decision-making bodies, involvement alongside the State of regional and even départment institutions and even municipal ones. It could not go unnoticed in all that. - finally, it has the very appreciable virtue, for every analyst, of being encapsulated in one or a few numbers useful for inter-sectorial comparison that serve also as a summarising translation of political will less easily appreciated without it.