Does anyone live here? Mine closures and depopulation in Spanish coal mining areas

Abstract

One of the most pressing socio-economic issues across EU countries has been the depopulation of a significant part of its territory. Less urbanized areas are perceived as non-attractive places to live and have been losing population steadily in the latest decades. For the case of Spain, this European-wise phenomenon has been exacerbated for several territories characterized by a large presence of primary and extractive industries in the past. We quantify empirically the contribution that the closure of the heavily subsidized coal mining had on the depopulation trends experienced in mining-intensive areas in Spain. This poses an interesting research question, since both non-mining and mining territories in Spain suffered a remarkable negative down trend in demographic terms since early nineties, which was the period on which the coal mining industry started to cease steadily its activity. Our empirical strategy relies on matching estimators that compare the demographic trend across mining-intensive and non-mining intensive municipalities in four provinces, controlling for observable characteristics and isolating the net effect of the “shock” originated by the termination of this mining activities. Our analysis finds a statistically significant and sizable negative effect on the fall of population for mining-intensive municipalities between 1991 and 2011.