For this week’s lesson, I found Globalization and the Economies of the North to be vey interesting and engaging. I love learning about economics and finance, and many of the Political Science classes here at UAF revolve around Arctic and Northern studies. the topic that I wrote about in my 1st Policy Brief surrounding many of the issues that were brought up for the Arctic. My case studies surrounded Canada, Alaska, and Greenland, but it was very interesting to learn about other economies like Malaysia’s economy!
One issue I thought was pretty gloomy to think about – on page 61, the author mentions that resources extracted must be valuable enough in order to spend financial resources to transport it. He mentions the Trans-Alaska pipeline which cost $8 billion+ to make. On the surface of this observation, it is pretty simple economic logic. However, this did spark concerns over how the oil and gas industry is regulated. I wonder to what extent companies do NOT extract oil in order to keep prices artificially inflated and, therefore, keep the oil valuable enough for the company to operate.