Economy

Understanding how our region creates, exchanges, and uses various goods and services is valuable for making decisions in everyday life. For the North Slope economy, oil and gas exploration, prices, and production are vital for creating jobs and generating tax revenue to help fund North Slope Borough essential services. Through economic growth we can improve our quality of life and productivity. However, oil and gas prices and production have lowered since 2015. Through our Iñupiaq values, we will continue to adapt to our economic environment to ensure our daily life is healthy. Voice of the Arctic Iñupiat aims to pass along knowledge and tools you can use to adjust to the economy.

North Slope Region

Statewide

International

Cost of Living 

Maintaining a good standard of living is essential for a healthy community. In the North Slope, our Iñupiat values of cooperation, subsistence hunting, family and kinship, and sharing create a mixed economy. Our mixed economy incorporates both traditional subsistence and cash economies to help alleviate higher costs of goods and services that we experience in the North Slope region. In addition to expensive food costs, high transportation costs, high unemployment rate, and the high cost of fuel required to engage in subsistence activities makes it difficult for a household’s ability to buy enough food to feed their families. This page means to pass along statistics and tools you can apply to understand the North Slope economy. For more information, please visit the following web links.

North Slope Region

Statewide

International