Full Title: A Bigger Bang Approach to Economic Development: An Application to Rural Appalachian Ohio Energy Boomtowns
Author(s): Mark Partridge and Nick Messenger
Publisher(s): Ohio River Valley Institute
Publication Date: September 20, 2023
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Description (excerpt):
Given the economic stagnation or collapse of many natural-resource dependent economies, it is time for a fresh start to consider new economic-development approaches that leverage high impact activities-; a strategy that does not double-down on natural-resource extraction that caused the problem in the first place or create even more environmental degradation that promotes out migration and further degrades a community’s future.
Appalachian Ohio is a good example of a region in need of a new strategy. Its long history of resource-extraction through logging, coal mining, and oil and gas development has not generated sustained economic prosperity. The region continues to lag the nation economically without any apparent catch up. Coal mining has played an outsized role in the region’s economy and its culture for decades, but no longer fuels its economy. Ohio coal-mining employment fell from over 40,000 in 1919, to 13,500 in 1982, falling all the way to 452 by 2021.1
Coal’s legacy includes fueling the nation’s development and industrialization. However, coal’s legacy also includes environmental destruction, dying coal communities, and a swath of health issues including a surprising uptick in Black Lung Disease in the last 20 years (Labao, et al., 2021). These negative externalities and coal’s long-running weak economic outlook have stimulated out-migration from Appalachian coal-country and very few people in-migrate. In fact, Betz et al. (2015) find that Appalachian regions with more coal mining suffer greater population losses than otherwise similar places, and their finding is after considering weak economic conditions in coal country—i.e., adverse environmental effect—not just poor economic prospects—also induce people to leave coal country.