PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER: ..Gov. Corbett, who found himself in the hot seat last week over his comments on the state’s lagging employment rate, has promoted Pennsylvania as a rival to Texas as a regional energy hub. In his budget address this year, he talked about the energy sector creating “hundreds of thousands of new jobs.”..
Mark Price, a labor economist with the liberal-leaning Keystone Research Center, says he can find only 20,000 direct jobs created from Marcellus Shale. Even if all coal-mining and legacy natural gas drilling is added together, “this is a sector that still only makes up half of 1 percent of Pennsylvania’s economy,” he said.…
[Timothy Kelsey, a Penn State agricultural economist] said the early studies assumed owners of natural gas leases would immediately spend most of their windfall in Pennsylvania, when anecdotal evidence suggests much of it got socked away in savings or investments… (more)
