More Economists Back Contentious Report

A controversial economic report that says environmental regulation has enhanced rather than restricted the Pacific Northwest’s economic growth continues to gain support.

When it was released in January the report - “Environmental Protection and Economic Well-Being in the Pacific Northwest,” had the endorsement of 34 economists throughout the region. At a press conference in Seattle Thursday, the report’s authors said the number of the region’s economists who have endorsed the study’s findings has grown to 64.

“People think economists rarely agree on anything,” Dr. Thomas Power of the University of Montana said at the press conference. “The growing number of economists that endorse this report indicates the widespread recognition among professionals that environmental protection is a key to the economic well-being of the Northwest.”

Power, whose comments Thursday were distributed to newspapers around the region, and a group of economists representing a variety of Northwest universities undertook their study in an effort to understand what they say is broad public pessimism about the condition of the Northwest economy.

By almost every measure, they say, the region’s economic condition has been robust in recent years.

They concluded that the pessimism stems from the decline in jobs provided by the historic staples of the Northwest economy: timber, mining, agriculture, aluminum and aerospace.

And, they found, the widespread popular belief is that environmental restrictions are responsible for those declines.

But in reality, they say, the declines are due to global competitive pressures for each of these industries to produce more with fewer and fewer people.

Among the study’s findings:

Environmental protection has helped create and maintain economic health and vitality in urban and rural areas alike, not undermine it.

The loss of jobs in our natural resource and aerospace industries are not primarily due to environmental restrictions.

The Pacific Northwest is not in desperate shape economically. “The economy is strong and decisions should not be made in haste.”

The report asserts, in fact, that environmental quality is crucial to the region’s economic future because it offers quality of life in an era in which more and more individuals and companies are free to live and work wherever they want.

Spokesmen at Thursday’s press conference emphasized that the report does not attempt to argue that natural resource-based industries do not and will not continue to be a crucial element of the Northwest economy.

But the resource-based industries will be a declining source of jobs in the future, and a quality environment has become more important in the region’s economic future, they argue.

, DataTimes