Resource booms leave regions worse off once they fade out.

Communities that enjoy well-paid jobs and low unemployment during a natural resources boom need to plan carefully for the serious economic hardships that will follow the inevitable bust. That is the key lesson from new research by Grant Jacobsen and Dominic Parker, which looks at what happened to ‘boomtowns’ in the American West during the oil drilling boom-bust cycle of the 1970s and 1980s.