Regional technological change in US coal mines: 1951–1976

Abstract

This paper analyses technological change in coal mines in five regions—the Northern and Southern Appalachians, the Rocky Mountains, the Interior and Gulf and Northern Great Plains. Such an analysis can help identify the regions that are growth centres of the future and those that are the declining centres, so that an orderly transfer of manpower and resources from the latter to the former can be brought about efficiently and expeditiously. Section 2 deals with changes in production profiles, over time, of the regions by dividing coal mines into underground and surface mines. It concludes that the Appalachian regions are the declining regions with lower labour productivity and that the Northern Great Plains, with its increasing labour productivity, is the expanding region. Technological changes (TC) in underground mines consist of replacement of conventional mining machines by the continuous miners and the replacement of the latter by the long-wall machines. The TC in the surface mines is the substitution of intermediate- and large-sized power shovels and draglines (PS and Ds) for their smaller size counterparts. Section 3 presents a methodology of S-shaped growth curves. Section 4 reports empirical results for growth rates of adoption of the newer techniques across regions. These results reveal that the Northern Great Plains region is not absorbing the manpower and resources released by the Appalachian regions so that there are shortages in the former in the face of unemployment in the latter. There is, therefore, an opportunity for the declining Appalachian regions to inform their surplus manpower and resources about the growth centre in the north and prepare them for relocation, retraining and readjustment to the changes.