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 1, 78-94
Abstract:
type="main" xml:id="ajar12043-abs-0001">
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 analyse 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 Surat 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 analysed for Surat basin CSG areas, where positive impacts (job spillovers) are restricted to construction and professional services jobs, while agricultural jobs have decreased.
Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (38)
Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1111/ajar.2015.59.issue-1 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
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:bla:ajarec:v:59:y:2015:i:1:p:78-94
Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://ordering.onli ... 1111/(ISSN)1467-8489
Access Statistics for this article
Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics is currently edited by John Rolfe, Lin Crase and John Tisdell
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 Wiley Content Delivery ().