The latest, greatest way to track performance in the U.S. oil industry is to look at the rig count released by Baker Hughes (see this Bloomberg article for a bit of discussion and links). The rig count was down 64 as U.S. oil companies continued retrenching in the face of lower oil prices.
I will make some comparisons between communities later, but I looked at location quotients (LQ) for Grand Forks employment by sector compared to the national average. It may not come as a surprise to others, but it did surprise me, that the Grand Forks metropolitan statistical area does not have high LQs, typical of an exporting firm and part of the regional economic base, in many sectors.
I get many questions about local economic development these days. The specific geography is usually either Grand Forks, city, county or metropolitan area, or the counties in northeast North Dakota. These questions come on the radio, from newspaper reporters, and general conversations from the public. The basic form of the question is, “What can or should Grand Forks do to grow and develop?”
Readers interested in the structure of the North Dakota economy and various policies should take a look at this Cato article about sugar price supports. Great explanation of the mechanisms, history, and consequences.
The December numbers for employment came out and I thought we would look at the mining category (which includes logging) against the West Texas Intermediate crude price per barrel. What we see is the following: