On August 21st, Mouhcine Guettabi, Associate Professor of Economics at ISER, and Jonathan King, an Anchorage private business consultant, were interviewed by Lori Townsend on Alaska Insight*, Alaska Public Media’s weekly public affairs program.  That program discussed how the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting the Alaska economy.  Dr. Guettabi opened the discussion by explaining that employment in Alaska will probably not fully recover by 2022.  Even if a vaccine is developed that ends the business closures and re-opens tourism by summer 2021, Dr. Guettabi projects that employment in the Alaska economy in 2022 will still be 5% below pre-pandemic levels. Read more about > Even under rosy assumptions, Alaska employment likely to still be down 5% in 2022

Dr. Mouhcine Guettabi and Jon Bittner join host Lori Townsend on a recent episode of Alaska Public Media’s Talk of Alaska to discuss the effects of COVID-19 on Alaska’s economy. The recording and transcript are available from their website.

Dr. Mouhcine Guettabi has completed an initial estimate of the possible impact of the COVID-19 business closures on the Alaska economy. To develop those estimates, he focused upon the impacts on the three most directly affected industries: leisure and hospitality, retail, and transportation. He estimated that the direct and indirect effects from reduced activity in those three sectors would be about 48,000 jobs and would reduce state GDP by almost $2 billion in the second quarter of 2020, If the closures are sustained, an additional $2 billion could be lost. Professor Guettabi's estimates may not capture the impacts of many smaller losses spread throughout the economy and do not include possible impacts on the economy from the recent collapse of oil prices. They also do not include the possible offsetting impact of federal COVID-19 aid to Alaska. Read more about > COVID-19’s impact on the Alaska economy