Natural Resource Curse and Poverty in Appalachian America

Understanding the resource curse (or blessing) across national and regional scales: Theory, empirical challenges and an application

“…Although studies econometrically evaluating the impacts of mining on regional economic development are still not abundant, some researchers have provided important insights on this matter (e.g. Black et al 2005;Marchand 2012;Partridge et al 2012;Reeson et al 2012;Caselli and Michaels 2013;Cavalcanti et al 2014;Weber 2014;Fleming and Measham 2015a;Paredes et al 2015).…”

“…Source (a) is not particularly relevant within countries or large provinces (federal states), where generally local/regional governments do not have the decision-making power to provide (or reject) mining permits over centralised national (or provincial/state) governments. However, when regions can affect mining activity decisions, endogeneity can be addressed by the use of instrumental variables such as resource reservoirs, which are correlated with the explanatory variable (mining activity), but not the dependent variable (the impacts from mining being measured) (Partridge et al 2012). On the other hand, source (b) can also raise some issues for economic evaluations, considering that modern mining booms are commonly linked to long-distance commuting workers not permanently residing in extractive regions.…”

Fracking Fortunes: Economic Well‐being and Oil and Gas Development along the Urban‐Rural Continuum

“…For our county‐specific purposes, there is evidence that the resource curse may operate at a subnational scale (Deaton and Niman ; James and Aadland ; Lobao et al ; Papyrakis and Gerlagh ; Partridge, Betz, and Lobao ; Stedman, Patriquin, and Parkins ), though not all subnational analyses have found evidence consistent with the resource curse (Betz et al ; Peach and Starbuck ). Still, these studies tend to focus on the rural side of the rural‐urban continuum when examining effects.…”

“…No framework or ‘rule‐of‐thumb’ currently exists that can be used to evaluate the level of rurality or interdependence of a community and determine the susceptibility of problems related to rapid growth.” Nonetheless, many contemporary studies analyze only rural areas (e.g., Brown ; Fisher ; Measham and Fleming ; Tunstall ; Weber )—but the studies focused on UOGE fail to distinguish how that extractive activity might impact rural communities compared to more urban or suburban areas. Further, others do not control for or consider the influence of counties’ level of rurality when analyzing both rural and urban counties (e.g., Haggerty et al ; Marchand ; Partridge et al ; Perdue and Pavela ). This article addresses this gap in the literature by allowing the socioeconomic impacts of UOGE activity to be conditioned by the rurality of a county.…”

“It’s Just a Way of Fitting In:” Tobacco Use and the Lived Experience of Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Appalachians

“…48 Similarly, Fekete et al found that non-Hispanic White men who had disclosed their HIV status to their mothers and had high family support had better CD4 counts and viral loads, while Latino men with lower family support had worse CD4 and viral loads when they had disclosed their status to their mothers. 51 These studies suggest that cultural and economic factors mediate the relationship of outness and health, and lend credence to the need to understand varying degrees of outness, particularly in the rural Appalachian setting in which SES tends to be low 52 and cultural factors play a large role in social norms. Most studies, however, have measured outness in just a few Likert scale questions (e.g., “Rate how out you are to your friends, with ‘1’ meaning not out at all to ‘5’ meaning completely out.”).…”