In the 10 years after the 1984-5 miners' strike, employment by British
Coal and the number of pits it operated fell by more than 90%. In thi
s paper darn for each of British Coal's collieries are used to analyse
the pattern of pit closure. The pits that closed were systematically
smaller, less productive and less profitable than those that survived.
A model is estimated to capture the degree to which closure decisions
reflect performance variables, and it is found that low productivity
was the most important indicator of vulnerability to closure. However,
closures were by no means exclusively concentrated on the worst perfo
rmers, and many of the pits that were closed at the end of the period
had achieved very large increases in productivity over the years prece
ding closure.