What is the difference between valuation and economic impacts?
In a very small nutshell, valuation answers the question is society better or worse off as the result of changing a policy. Commercial harvester value is essentially their profits and angler value can be thought of as angler profit: that is what the angler gets to keep above and beyond what they paid to go fishing. Economic impacts should never be used to determine if an increase in the size limit or a change in allocation should be made. Instead economic impacts trace the flow of expenditures in an economy and do two things: demonstrate the current size and therefore importance of recreational fishing and, when a policy change occurs they track how the policy changes expenditure patterns defining who specifically wins or looses as a result of a policy. We are also mandated by law to estimate both value and economic impacts.
