The evolution of mining employment during the resource boom and bust cycle in Australia

Nam Foo () and Ruhul Salim
Additional contact information
Nam Foo: School of Business and Law, Edith Cowan University

Mineral Economics, 2022, vol. 35, issue 2, No 9, 309-324

Abstract: Abstract Mining employment in Australia can be cyclical and volatile. Since the gold rush in the 1850s, Australia has experienced two major mining booms. The first was in the 1970s and the second (i.e., the mineral boom) was in the mid-2000s and so it is important to have a discussion about trends in the Australian mining industry and about employment during mining cycles. This study employs Australian mining industry data to investigate sectoral labor mobility (moving from one industry to another) when the business cycles have changed. This research has used quarterly data from 1950q1 to 2018q4 for several industries such as mining, the building and construction industry, rental, hiring and real estate services, transport, postal and warehousing, agriculture, forestry and fishing, and manufacturing to conduct an empirical analysis. The findings of this study provide evidence that the sectoral shift of mining employment in Australia’s mineral and resource industry is highly correlated and dependent on the world economic circumstances. What happens in the world economies has an important bearing on how shocks are transmitted to the Australian mining industry and other sectors. The study also shows that displaced mining workers move around from one industry to another. In particular, the building and construction, agricultural, fishing and forestry, manufacturing, and real estate industries are found to be highly affected by the movement of labor.

Keywords: Resource boom; Mining employment; Australia; Sectoral (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O11 O13 Q33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s13563-022-00320-8 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:minecn:v:35:y:2022:i:2:d:10.1007_s13563-022-00320-8

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/13563

DOI: 10.1007/s13563-022-00320-8

Access Statistics for this article

Mineral Economics is currently edited by Magnus Ericsson and Patrik Söderholm

More articles in Mineral Economics from Springer, Raw Materials Group (RMG), Luleå University of Technology
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().