Arctic Economics

What happened to the price of oil last year?

Oil price movements in 2007-08 were memorable:

 

Source: Hamilton.

What happened?  James Hamilton of UC San Diego (and Econbrowser) takes a stab at an explanation.  Here's the short version ( in two parts from Econbrowser): Causes of the Oil Shock of 2007-08 and Consequences of the Oil Shock of 2007-08.  Here's the long version (from the Brookings Institution) - Causes and Consequences of the Oil Shock of 2007-09.

Sled dogs to snowmobiles

In the early 1990s, Alaska's Board of Fisheries had to address a controversy over the feeding of subsistence fish to dogs used for commercial purposes.  To provide some background, David Anderson prepared a paper on the use of dog teams in the Yukon River drainage, and their fish consumption, for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game's Division of Subsistence.    Anderson described the evolving role of dog sledding in the regional economy: The Use of Dog Teams and the Use of Subsistence-caught Fish for Feeding Sled Dogs in the Yukon River Drainage, Alaska.

Coastal Eskimos had been using sled dogs for a long time prior to contact with the West:

What happened to Iceland?

Michael Lewis explains, in the April Vanity Fair: Wall Street on the Tundra:

Iceland instantly became the only nation on earth that Americans could point to and say, “Well, at least we didn’t do that.”