On IEEE Spectrum – a discussion on the Resource Curse Are Fossil Fuels Impoverishing Middle America? IEEE Spectrum 12-MAY-2021
In our analysis, what we have basically found is that for that entire region (Appalachia) — which has a population of almost a million people, if you aggregate all of the counties—we can only see evidence for a net jobs increase of about 5600. So a very tiny increase that comes to a total of just 1.6 percent. And to put that in context, the nation as a whole, during the period of time in which fracking took place starting roughly in 2008 and going through 2019, which I might add is before the onset of the coronavirus crisis, the nation as a whole increased its number of jobs by 10 percent as compared to the just 1.6 percent here. And going back to your analogy to Equatorial Guinea, that 1.6 percent increase in jobs came at a time when gross domestic product in this region, total economic output was expanding at three times the rate of the U.S. economy’s output as a whole.