recession

ISER Professor Mouhcine Guettabi forecasts modest economic growth for the Alaska economy for 2021 and 2022.  However, he expects that this modest growth will not be enough for Alaska to fully recover from the COVID-19 pandemic shock.  Professor Guettabi projects that the economy in 2022 will still be 5% below the pre-pandemic level.  The forecast appears in a report entitled Alaska’s Economy and the pandemic, which was prepared for the Alaska Department of Commerce, Community and Economic Development (DCCED.)  The projection that Alaska’s economy will not fully recover by 2022 is consistent with similar Federal Reserve forecasts for the US economy.

Since the start of the most recent recession, driven by the decline in oil prices and consequent contraction of government and private sector spending, the state has lost upwards of 13,000 jobs. But these losses have not been felt equally. ISER’s Mouhcine Guettabi uses employment data between June 2015 and June 2018, to show how each of Alaska’s 19 boroughs and 10 census areas have fared in this recent report.

“The end of the recession is potentially approaching,” Mouhcine Guettabi said on a recent Talk of Alaska on Alaska Public Radio. Guettabi and Neal Fried, senior economist with the State of Alaska’s Department of Labor, agreed that the recession may be ending in the next few months, with the forecast for 2019 being positive, but with little job growth.

The final report, Short-Run Economic Impacts of Alaska Fiscal Options, by Gunnar Knapp, Matthew Berman, and Mouhcine Guettabi, is now available for downloading. It replaces all earlier versions. Also available is a presentation by Gunnar Knapp, for the Alaska Senate Finance Committee on March 30, 2016, discussing the Alaska economy as well as the report findings.