#6 - The extractive economy of the “Old West” is rare in the New West.
Much of the West – and Westerners’ sense of place – has been shaped by mining, energy development and timber production. Yet today there are few truly resource-dependent counties left – even in the face of a sharp push for energy development in the interior West.
This is true for a couple of basic reasons: by and large our regional competitive advantage no longer lies in basic commodity, or even energy, production; technology investments in extractive enterprises have dramatically reduced jobs without decreasing output; and the service-based economy has eclipsed extractive enterprises.
Today less than 5 percent of the counties in the West (20 out of 411 counties) have more than 20 percent of their job base in timber, mining or energy development (including oil, gas and coal), as the figure below shows.
Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census. 2004. County Business Patterns (CBP). Washington, DC. Resource extraction includes the following categories (according to NAICS): Forestry; Wood Products Manufacturing; Paper and Allied Products Manufacturing; and Mining (including mineral, coal, oil and gas).
Less than one percent of the counties in the West (five counties to be precise: Stillwater and Golden Valley, Montana; Eureka and Pershing, Nevada; Greenlee, Arizona) have more than 50 percent of their jobs in resource extraction.
In these few instances, extractive industry jobs remain important. However, their traditional strength – wages – no longer looks so rosy. In 2003 the average wage per job in counties that were over 20 percent dependent on resource extractive jobs was $34,866. This was significantly lower than for the West as a whole ($43,374).
Source: U.S. Department of Commerce, 2004. Bureau of Economic Analysis, Regional Economic Information System (REIS CD-ROM). Washington, D.C.
In addition, for more than a decade resource-dependent counties have had the slowest rate of increase in wages, growing by only 2 percent from 1990 to 2003 in real terms. By contrast, wages in the West as a whole grew by 12 percent during that time.
The “Old West” is still out there, though in fewer places and with less to offer than in the past.
Additional Resources
- The USDA’s county typology codes, which include a mining dependent category, are an alternative way to think about economic dependence generally. See www.ers.usda.gov/briefing/rurality/Typology.
- A good book on the West’s struggle to move beyond it’s 19th century economic roots is Tom Power’s Post-Cowboy Economics: Pay and Prosperity in the New American West (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2001).