Local economic impacts of an unconventional energy boom: the coal seam gas industry in Australia

David Fleming and Thomas Measham

Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, 2015, vol. 59, issue 01

Abstract: Complementing the scarce economic literature about local impacts of energy extraction booms, this paper empirically investigates economic outcomes related to the new coal seam gas (CSG) industry located across southern Queensland. This Australian state has seen an unprecedented inflow of investments into the extraction of this previously unexploited unconventional natural gas over the last decade. We analyze census data to study income and employment effects associated with the CSG boom, exploiting the quasi-experimental conditions provided by CSG extraction areas (treatment regions) and regions without this development (control regions). Findings show that treatment regions have higher income growth than control areas during 2001–2011 for families residing locally and for individuals present on census night. Employment in the mining sector also shows higher growth as has non-mining employment in some areas. We include comparisons between CSG areas with no major mining history (the Surratt basin) and CSG areas where mining was important before the CSG boom (the Bowen basin), to better understand boom effects in areas with different initial mining industry importance in their economies. Local job multipliers are also analyzed for Surratt basin CSG areas, where positive impacts (job spillovers) are restricted to construction and professional services jobs, while agricultural jobs have decreased.

Keywords: Resource/Energy; Economics; and; Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (22)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/280228/files/ajar12043.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Local economic impacts of an unconventional energy boom: the coal seam gas industry in Australia (2015)
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:ags:aareaj:280228

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.280228

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics from Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().