I tire of the political arguments in either side of this specific issue when I think a fundamental economic issue gets little attention. Those called the “left” oppose this happening at any price. Those on the “right” want the leases available but tend to think the price should be low for unintelligible reasons.
I am often asked about the relative position of oil and other industries in the ND economy. Usually this is me being asked to settle a dispute between industries as to who is more important or some such nonsense. However, the issue of oil in the North Dakota economy is worth revisiting right now given the decline in oil price and the effects on the state revenue forecast.
The recent drops and volatility in commodities markets, particularly oil, are well-known. One of the big ongoing questions for the state of North Dakota is the impact on the state economy of these new developments in oil. We have seen that oil and gas output is not necessarily suffering with the price decreases or volatility. So where are the effects? You might expect to see it in a graph of labor force, like this:
Continue reading North Dakota Labor Force: Oil Bust? Edition
Recently I visited New York City and had occasion to talk with some people about the situation with oil in North Dakota. The question on their mind has to do with the continued high level of oil production despite the decreased price. Rather than total amount of oil produced, or barrels per day, let’s consider a different measurement, the amount of oil per rig.
The subtitle of this post could be bludgeoning the reader with numbers, but oh well.
As I mentioned in last week’s post (available here) there was a scheduled update to the detailed data on state-level real GDP this week. With any update like this there are many different dimensions to consider. The first aspect to consider is the release of new data. New data provides us an updated look at the state of the economy and (hopefully) a better sense of the good, the bad, and yes, the ugly. In these releases there are also updates to the older data. More complete information is available as time passes so we get a better look at what happened in the recent past.