Study
| EST. READ TIME 1 MIN.Policy uncertainty main reason for reduced investor confidence in Alberta’s oil and gas sector
While an analysis of the share prices of firms show that savvy investors have already “priced in” many of the concerns about oil transport and access to outside markets, the Fraser Institute’s annual Global Petroleum Survey shows that investor confidence in Alberta is taking a serious hit.
The survey’s Policy Perception Index measures the extent of policy-related investment barriers within each jurisdiction. The higher the score, the more negative the sentiment on the part of respondents, indicating that they regard the jurisdiction in question as relatively unattractive for investment. Alberta’s score deteriorated from a value of 26.6 in 2014 to 34.2 in 2015, and its global rank as a desirable location for investment fell to 38th (out of 126) in 2015, down from 16th (out of 156) in 2014.
Areas such as political stability, fiscal terms, uncertainty concerning protected areas, and taxation experienced large negative shifts, indicating that more investors are viewing these areas as barriers to investment in Alberta.
During Alberta’s last royalty review, when investors also downgraded Alberta’s ratings in the Global Petroleum Survey, exploration and development spending in Alberta declined, while neighboring Saskatchewan and British Columbia saw increases in investment.
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Ross McKitrick
Professor of Economics, University of Guelph
Ross R. McKitrick is a Professor of Economics at the University of Guelph and a Senior Fellow of the Fraser Institute. Heis the author of Economic Analysis of Environmental Policy published by the University of Toronto Press in 2010. He has been actively studying climate change, climate policy and environmental economics since the mid-1990s. He built and published one of the first national-scale Computable General Equilibrium models for analysing the effect of carbon taxes on the Canadian economy in the 1990s. His academic publications have appeared in many top journals including the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Journal of Geophysical Research, Climate Dynamics, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, The Canadian Journal of Economics, Canadian Public Policy, Energy Economics, Journal of Forecasting, Climatic Change, Climate Change Economics and Environmental Economics and Policy Studies. He has also written policy analyses for numerous Canadian and international think tanks. Professor McKitrick appears frequently in Canadian and international media and is a regular contributor to the Financial Post Comment page. In addition to his economics research his background in applied statistics has led him to collaborative work across a wide range of topics in the physical sciences including paleoclimate reconstruction, malaria transmission, surface temperature measurement and climate model evaluation. Professor McKitrick has made many invited academic presentations around the world, and has testified before the US Congress and committees of the Canadian House of Commons and Senate. Professor McKitrick is widely-cited in Canada and around the world as an expert on global warming and environmental policy issues. He has been interviewed by Time, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The National Post, The Globe and Mail, the CBC, BBC, ITV, Fox News, Bloomberg, Global TV, CTV, and others. His research has been discussed in such places as Nature, Science, The Economist, the MIT Technology Review, The National Post, The Globe and Mail and in a front page article in the The Wall Street Journal (Feb 14 2005).… Read more Read Less… -
Kenneth P. Green
Senior Fellow, Fraser Institute
Kenneth P. Green is a Fraser Institute senior fellow and author of over 800 essays and articles on public policy,published by think tanks, major newspapers, and technical and trade journals in North America. Mr. Green holds a doctoral degree in environmental science and engineering from UCLA, a master’s degree in molecular genetics from San Diego State University, and a bachelors degree in general biology from UCLA.Mr. Green’s policy analysis has centered on evaluating the pros and cons of government management of environmental, health, and safety risk. More often than not, his research has shown that governments are poor managers of risk, promulgating policies that often do more harm than good both socially and individually, are wasteful of limited regulatory resources, often benefit special interests (in government and industry) at the expense of the general public, and are almost universally violative of individual rights and personal autonomy. Mr. Green has also focused on government’s misuse of probabilistic risk models in the defining and regulating of EHS risks, ranging from air pollution to chemical exposure, to climate change, and most recently, to biological threats such as COVID-19.Mr. Green's longer publications include two supplementary text books on environmental science issues, numerous studies of environment, health, and safety policies and regulations across North America, as well as a broad range of derivative articles and opinion columns. Mr. Green has appeared frequently in major media and has testified before legislative bodies in both the United States and Canada.… Read more Read Less…
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