Tue, 07/27/2021 - 7:07pm
A nearly empty lot for staging new cars is seen outside Kendall Toyota of Anchorage July 23. A microship shortage reducing new car inventory has sent used vehicle prices soaring by 47 percent in Alaska. (Photo/Emily Mesner/Anchorage Daily News)
The global slowdown in auto manufacturing has left many showroom floors and car lots in Alaska nearly empty.
Auto dealers say the situation follows a national trend that has boosted demand for used cars and trucks, causing prices of those vehicles to skyrocket.
They say the problem is unprecedented, and rooted in pandemic-related supply snarls that reduced the availability of microchips and other parts for new cars.
Overall, Alaska ranked fifth for breweries per capita and fourth in gallons consumed per capita in 2020, according to the Brewers Association cited in the report.
April 2020 was the month that Alaskans started feeling the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, for the first time, the state can compare how much the business landscape
Alaska oil industry still reeling from pandemic crash even as prices recover Published 1 hour ago
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Print article The price of North Slope crude largely recovered months ago from the unprecedented fall it took a year ago, but if a recovery is also going to occur in Alaska’s oil workforce it has yet to materialize. Preliminary employment data for March from the state Labor Department indicates the industry is continuing in the other direction. Approximately 6,300 people were employed in the state’s oil and gas sector last month, which was in line with February but did not reverse a declining trend that has persisted since the start of the pandemic.
Alaska’s struggling economy shows no obvious signs of ‘organic’ recovery, UAA economist says
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Print article Alaska’s economy isn’t getting worse, but it could be a long way from substantial improvement. Many of the indicators showing improvements in recent months are more tied to the normal seasonality of the state’s economy and less about a recovery from the forces of the pandemic, said Mouchine Guettabi, an economist with the University of Alaska Anchorage Institute for Social and Economic Research. “Our losses ballooned over the summer and then shrunk back down in fall and the winter. That doesn’t mean things are getting better; it just means that we’re losing, or had, fewer jobs in the economy,” Guettabi told a virtual audience during a presentation hosted April 9 by the Alaska policy think-tank Commonwealth North.