Newswise — While every day, television and the Internet bombard the country with images of oily birds and other creatures, vividly depicting the effects of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, other images are beginning to circulate – images of economic loss that one Texas Tech University expert says is catastrophic and will have far-reaching effects that will likely transmit to the nation as a whole.
Bradley Ewing, the Rawls Professor in Operations Management and area coordinator in Information Systems & Quantitative Sciences in Texas Tech’s Rawls College of Business, is available to discuss the economic impact of the Gulf disaster.
“On May 24, U.S. Department of Commerce Secretary Gary Locke declared a fishery disaster in the Gulf of Mexico because of the economic impact of the spill,” Ewing said. “This catastrophic event will have far-reaching and long-lasting economic impacts on Gulf coast states that will likely transmit to a much broader region and to the nation as a whole.”
Ewing expects that in the immediate term the Gulf region will experience problems with business continuity and disruptions in the supply chain. Direct and secondary impacts will hinder economic recovery while longer term impacts will depend in part on the specifics of federal and state assistance.
“Research on economic resiliency and rate of recovery suggest that the process will be slower for more-integrated and supply-chain dependent industries and that there will be differential impacts for small vs. large businesses and rural vs. urban communities,” Ewing said.
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