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The 10 Most Important Things to Understand About Alaska's Economy
Gunnar Knapp
Alaska's economy is changing with the times. What changes are occurring? And what are the most important things Alaskans should understand about our economy? This article appeared in the March 2002 edition of the Alaska Business Monthly magazine.
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Survey of Living Conditions in the Arctic: Inuit, Saami and the Indigenous Peoples of Chukotka (SLICA)
Jack Kruse, Birger Poppel, and Thomas Anderson
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Economic Impact of Studded Tires in Alaska
Eric Larson
Studded tires in Alaska create economic impacts for vehicle owners, the government and the community as a whole. For each of these groups this chapter describes and estimates the economic impacts of studded tires. These impacts include spending for studded tires, revenues collected from the tire tax, the costs of road maintenance, and the savings from traffic crashed avoided by the use of studded tires.
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Special Olympics Winter Games Add $22 Million to Anchorage Economy
Eric Larson and Oliver Scott Goldsmith
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ISER Review 2000 - 2002
Linda Leask
This report provides summary information from selected research conducted by the Institute of Social and Economic Research between 2000 and 2002. This edition includes challenges to Alaska's salmon fishery, The launch of an online collection of materials on Alaska Native culture, language, and history (Alaskool.org), the economic impact of Anchorage's International Airport, land ownership in Alaska, the contribution of tourism to Alaska's economy, and many more!
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![Program Evaluation: [Rose] Urban Rural Youth Program by G. Williamson McDiarmid and Rosyland Frazier](https://scholarworks.alaska.edu/uaa_iser_reports/1500/thumbnail.jpg "Program Evaluation: [Rose] Urban Rural Youth Program by G. Williamson McDiarmid and Rosyland Frazier")
Program Evaluation: [Rose] Urban Rural Youth Program
G. Williamson McDiarmid and Rosyland Frazier
This report evaluates how well the Alaska Humanties Forum Urban/Rural Youth Program - intended to build understanding and a statewide sense of community - achieved its aims in the first year of operation. The main body of this report provides information in both table and narrative form. Most of the qualitative information consists of verbatim quotes from students and parents. An executive summary is also available.
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Capstone Phase I Interim Safety Study, 2000/2001
N/A N/A
The FAA Alaska Region’s Capstone program is a joint initiative with industry to improve aviation safety and efficiency in Alaska, by using new tools and technology to provide infrastructure and services. The first phase of Capstone is in southwest Alaska, primarily in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta (Y-K Delta). This technology is most likely to help prevent mid-air collisions and controlled-flight-into- terrain (CFIT) accidents, which make up only a small part of the small-plane accidents in southwest Alaska but are the most likely to cause deaths. Aside from helping prevent accidents, the technology is designed to make it easier for pilots to fly—by making it easier to navigate, by providing more current weather information, and by making instrument landings possible when weather deteriorates. To learn the benefits and limitations of these new tools and technologies, the Capstone program contracted with the University of Alaska Anchorage’s Institute of Social and Economic Research and the Aviation Technology Division to evaluate aviation safety changes in the Capstone area. This Capstone Interim Safety Report describes those changes through the end of 2001.
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Recreation and Tourism in South-Central Alaska: Patterns and Prospects prepared for the US Forest Service Pacific Northwest Station
Martha Tomeo, Steve Colt, Stephanie Martin, and Jenna Mieren
Based on data from various sources, this report describes the extent and nature of recreation and tourism in south-central Alaska. Current activities, past trends, and prospective developments are presented. Particular attention is given to activities that occur on, or are directly affected by management of, the Chugach National Forest. Recreation and tourism in and around the forest are also placed in a larger context. The Chugach National Forest is heavily used as a scenic resource by motorists and waterborne passengers; road access to the forest supports recreation activities such as fishing, camping, hiking, and wildlife viewing. Although the annual rate of increase in visitors to south-central Alaska seems to have slowed in the late 1990s, evidence indicates that currently both visitors and Alaska residents are increasingly seeking active forms of recreation and ?soft adventure.? These demands, combined with likely capacity constraints at well-known attractions in Alaska and entrepreneurial efforts to provide short-duration recreation and tourism experiences, may lead to increasing use of the Chugach National Forest.
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Rural/Non-Rural Determination for Federal Subsistence Management in Alaska; Analysis of Economic and Community Infrastructure Variables Relatives to the Determination of Rurality.
Bradford Tuck and Victor Fischer
This report presents alternative methodologies for identifying rural and non-rural areas for federal subsistence management in Alaska. The report develops two alternative methodologies for distinguishing rural and non-rural populations in Alaska for federal subsistence management. The methodologies use measures drawn from the federal decennial census and the State of Alaska’s harvest records, among other relevant data sources. An overriding goal of the project was to use a minimal number of criteria that clearly, effectively, and defensibly distinguish between rural and non-rural populations. The two methodologies are tested on a selection of Alaska communities. It is the final report for the project, Rural/Non-Rural Determinations for Federal Subsistence Management in Alaska (Contract No. 701811CO58), U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Alaska Region.
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The Alaska Wood Products Industry in 2001
Amy Wiita
This report highlights pertinent issues and summarized current information available about the Alaska forest products industry. Much of the industry activity has historically been in Southeast Alaska-based on harvests from the Tongass National Forest and in more recent times from Alaska Native corporation lands-but there are also activities in Southcentral and interior Alaska. To prepare this report, we examined a wide range of literature and talked to a number of people associated with the Alaska forest products industry.
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Alcohol Control Policies and American Indian Communities
Matthew Berman
Alcohol control policies such as taxation, restricting access by youth, or outright prohibition change the supply conditions for alcohol. That is, they aim to reduce the amount that becomes available for people to consume at whatever price level. Alternatively, they may be seem to raise the cost to consumers for obtaining any given quantity (figure l). The figure shows that a control policy such as a tax on alcohol would raise the cost to consumers and therefore reduce consumption....In the final analysis, alcohol control is only one of many opportunities to empower communities. But alcohol control can contribute to community empowerment. How one controls alcohol is likely to be as important, if not more important, than the type of policy implemented.
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Public School Finance Programs for the United States and Canada: 1998-99
Matthew Berman
This publication was undertaken by NCES in partnership with two private entities, the The Association for Education Finance and Policy, which contracted for the information collection, and the National Education Association (NEA), which funded the effort. This publication of expert authors' descriptions of each state or province funding system was compiled by education finance researchers from the University of Georgia and the University of Ottawa....The compilers sought to balance the simplicity of the descriptions to make them understandable to a wide audience and, at the same time, technically correct. Some of the terms and concepts might be new to the reader who is unfamiliar with the arcane art of education state aid formulas. To true finance sophisticates, however, these descriptions may lack the abstruse detail to deploy similar formulas in other venues.... The papers in this publication were requested by the National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. Department of Education. They are intended to promote the exchange of ideas among researchers and policymakers, no official support by the U.S. Department of Education or NCES is intended or should be inferred.
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Alaska Natives and the "New Harpoon": Economic Performance of the ANCSA Regional Corporations
Steve Colt
In this paper I develop and analyze 20 years of data on the economic performance of the 12 regional corporations created by the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971 (ANCSA).The act was a radical departure from previous U.S. policy toward indigenous peoples. Alaska's 75,000 Aleuts, Eskimos, and Indians received almost $1 billion in cash and acquired clear title to more than 40 million acres of land, an area larger than New England. This wealth was vested in 12 regional and almost 200 village-level business corporations. As a group, the 12 regional corporations lost 80 percent of their original cash endowment -- about $380 million -- in direct business operations between 1973 and 1993. But behind this poor overall financial performance is a surprising amount of cross-sectional variation. I first show that allocation of business assets to different economic sectors plays a statistically significant but empirically minor role in explaining this differential performance. I then construct panel data on shareholder employment, wages, and quasirents and test the hypothesis that the regional corporations traded off business profits for Native jobs. The data strongly reject this hypothesis. Quasirents from Native shareholder employment were important to only three firms -- the rest lost money without any countervailing employment. Case history evidence suggests that internal sharing networks and common preferences helped the high-employment firms to deliver both jobs and dividends. Overall, these results suggest caution in the use of group-based lump-sum transfers as economic development tools.
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Economic Importance of Healthy Alaska Ecosystems
Steve Colt
Alaska's healthy ecosystems are scarce and valuable economic resources. As population, income, education and development pressures increase worldwide, the relative scarcity -- and hence the value -- of these ecosystems is almost certain to increase significantly. However, because most ecosystem services are provided as public goods rather than through private markets, the value of these services must be registered and acted on within the public policy arena. this report presents an itiial assessment of the economic importance of Alaska's ecosystesm in their unimpaired state.
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What's the Economic Importance of Alaska's Healthy Ecosystems?
Steve Colt
About one quarter of Alaska’s jobs depend in one way or another on the state's fish, wildlife, scenic beauty, recreational opportunities, and public lands. That’s a rough estimate of what healthy ecosystems contribute to the economy. Salmon and other natural assets depend on habitat, clean water, and other benefits from Alaska’s ecosystems.2 Those natural assets in turn support jobs—about 84,000, once we adjust for some double-counting across industries. We include only jobs that depend on healthy ecosystems and natural assets and that are sustainable year after year. About half the ecosystem-related jobs rely on commercial, sport, and subsistence harvests of fish and wildlife. Tourism, recreation, and government management of public lands and resources support the other half. Another way of measuring the economic importance of Alaska’s ecosystems is what economists call “net willingness to pay.” That’s an estimate of how much more Americans would be willing to pay—besides what they already spend— to maintain Alaska’s natural assets. That method allows economists to assign a dollar value to things like scenery. Why would we want to put an economic value on such intangibles? It’s a useful way of show- ing that—aside from other kinds of value—Alaska’s healthy ecosystems have enormous economic value. Our ability to estimate net (or additional) willingness to pay for ecosystem benefits does vary, depending on what’s being valued.
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Environmental Report for Trans Alaska Pipeline System Renewal Volume 1 of 2 Sections 1, 2, 3, 4
Oliver Scott Goldsmith
This report provides a comprehensive environment analysis of the impacts associated with the renewal of the TAPS right-of-way. The federal council on Environment Quality guidelines contained in 40 CFR 1500-1517 have used to prepare this report so that the requirements of the National Environmental Policy are satisfied. As such, this report describes the proposed action and the dismantlement and removal of TAPS , and restoration of the right-of-way. The report then details the physical, biological, and social-economic environments and the impacts of the proposed action the no-action alternative on the environment, including cumulative effects. Measures to mitigate these impacts are also described.
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Economic Projections: Alaska and the Southern Railbelt, 2000-2025
Scott Goldsmith
In the 30 years between statehood and 1990, Alaska was dominated by petroleum-driven growth punctuated by a number of boom and bust cycles, each of which has brought the economy to a higher plateau of activity (Figure 1.) Since 1990 the Alaska economy has moved into a period of slower growth because petroleum production—the source of half of state value added—is now in decline. Continued exploitation of petroleum resources, even as production declines, as well as growth in other basic industries such as tourism and mining, will help to offset this loss and stabilize the economy. But dependence on commodity-producing industries means that cycles in the petroleum, fishing, timber, and mining sectors will continue to generate business cycles at the state and regional levels. The large federal and state government presence in the economy means that political decisions made in Washington and Juneau will continue to exert a strong influence on the economy.
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Reflections on the Surplus Economy and the Alaska Permanent Fund
Scott Goldsmith
The Alaska Permanent Fund was created in 1977, shortly after oil form Alaska's North Slope began flowing to market through the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. It was originally envisioned to serve two general purposes - to set aside a share of oil revenues for the benefit of future generations of Alaskans after the depletion of the oil reserves, and to keep a share of oil revenues out of the hands of the current generation of politicians who could be counted to spend it on wasteful government operations and capital expenditures....The issue is how to design a set of public fiscal institutions that, taking this new revenue into account, will maximize long-term social welfare. Paper presented at a conference held at the University of Alberta, Sept. 2001.
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Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport: Economic Significance 2000
Scott Goldsmith
Employment at the Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport in 2000 is estimated at 9,119 ( annual average), generating an annual payroll of $367 million. This represents about 7% of all the wage and salary jobs in Anchorage and 8% of total payroll. Adding the offsite jobs generated by airport businesses making purchases and workers spending their earnings within the community, the total economic significance of the airport grows to 14,750 jobs with a payroll of $515 million. If the airp01i were a separate community it would be the 5th largest economy in the state. The airport is about 5 times the size one would expect for a community of 260 thousand, but only partly because most of the travel between Anchorage and the rest of the US is by air. Most of the activity at the airport is associated with international air cargo, nonAlaska visitors, and non-Anchorage residents of Alaska. Together these activities at the airport, which bring new money into the economy and contribute directly to the economic base of Anchorage, account for 6,443 jobs and $259 million of payroll. Adding the off site activity generated by these onsite jobs results in a total impact of these basic activities of 10,352 jobs and $361 million of payroll. By way of comparison, the headquarters activity of the oil and gas industry in Anchorage directly employed 3,515 in 1999 with a payroll of $316 million. Viewed this way it is clear that the basic activities at the airport are an important part of the economic base of the community.
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The Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend Program
Scott Goldsmith
This paper provides a short introduction to the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend Program - a method for returning a portion of the revenues from petroleum development to the citizens of Alaska as a direct cash payment. It briefly touches on 5 topics - the mechanics of the Dividend, why it was established, its history, its economic, political and social effects, and the future of the Dividend.
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