Alaska Permanent Fund

Nzokanhyilu · 2008-08-06T12:46:21+00:00

I have been meaning to put this up for sometime (and not sure if I brought this forward before or has been discussed here or BCS etc). Am a bit busy at the moment, but I hope you guys spend a little time reading about it and see what we can learn as Africans (let alone Tanzanians). It is never too late!! In the 1970's, during the construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, the state realized that the new oil leases would produce an enormous windfall. Its citizens set up the Alaska Permanent Fund to manage this income, directing that the revenue be invested, the principal remain untouched and the gains be used for state infrastructure investments. A part of the proceeds was distributed as dividends to every Alaskan. By July 2002, the fund had grown to more than $23.5 billion. Dividend payments to Alaskan families averaged about $8,000 per year. Sharing Alaskan Style Last year a lone Atlantic Richfield oil rig drilled into a sea of oil beneath Alaska's Arctic ice. The find is worth billions and has the oil industry aflutter. Humble Oil announced it would spend $39 million to open the legendary Northwest Passage linking Alaska to the East Coast; British Petroleum, with holdings on Alaska's North Slope, obtained Sinclair Oil's East Coast marketing rights from Atlantic Richfield this year for $400 million and recently took over Standard Oil of Ohio. A Fairbanks pharmacist's modest $4,800 land investment on the North Slope returned $2 million recently. The state of Alaska, dependent on federal spending for 36 percent of its annual gross product, should thrive on revenue from the oil leases (California's last competitive oil lease went for about $600 million). But the new jobs and expanded incomes would bypass 178 remote, far-flung Alaskan Native villages, because the capital-intensive oil industry has little use for unskilled, semi-educated Natives. To avoid their exclusion, the Alaskan Federation of Natives, representing 55,000 Eskimos, Aleuts and, Indians filed claim to 250 million acres, asserting aboriginal occupancy. Alaska: Share Oil

Thread starter Nzokanhyilu
Start date Aug 6, 2008

Nzokanhyilu

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Alaska Permanent Fund

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