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Permits and licensing provide means to verify appropriate participation and allocation of resources. For example, foreign participation is limited in most U.S. fisheries. Permits are fundamental to individual transferable quotalimited access privilege programs (LAPP), also known as individual transferable quota or individual fishing quota (IFQ) and limited access privilege (LAP), which are increasingly used as instruments to manage fisheries from the perspectives of optimum yield and economic viability. Permits also facilitate collection of critical harvest, effort, and economic data and are fundamental to enforcing compliance with record-keeping and reporting laws and regulations. Permits are also critical for analytic purposes such as determining economic dependence on fisheries, studying fishery development and collapse, assessing status of stocks, and as the basis of allocation decisions.

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