In odd quirk, Alaska outperforms Lower 48

The Alaska unemployment rate for February was actually lower than the U.S. rate.

The last time that happened was in 1983 -- 26 years ago -- or it was just last December, depending on how fussy you want to be about it.

The point is this hardly ever happens, and state labor economists think the flip-flop is likely to be short-lived as the Alaska economy continues to show signs of sagging.

Massive job losses in the Lower 48, where industries and consumers are swooning from the global recession, is the reason the U.S. jobless rate has caught Alaska's.

Here are the numbers:

• 8 percent -- Alaska's seasonally adjusted unemployment rate for February.

• 8.1 percent -- the U.S. rate for February.

While that's the slightest of differences, it's incredibly unusual. For most of this decade, until last summer, the Alaska jobless rate held steady at one to two percentage points higher than the national rate.

The last time the Alaska rate was consistently lower occurred in the early 1980s, when Alaska's economy was red hot.

"The nation was in the midst of a deep recession and we were in the middle of one of our biggest oil-revenue fueled booms," said Neal Fried, a state labor economist.

"It did not last long and this probably won't either. Eventually a combination of job seekers coming north, few Alaskans leaving and an improving national labor market returned us to a 'normal' relationship."

As for whether the flip-flop really started last December, Dan Robinson, another state labor economist, said that when the federal government recently revised December's jobless rates, the Alaska rate plunged below the national rate for the month.

Robinson asked the feds about it. "I got complicated statistical answers," he said. "For me the bottom line was that nothing in the real world had changed enough for our rate to go from 7.5 to 6.8 percent" in December. The national rate that month was 7.2 percent.

As for Alaska beating the federal rate in February, Robinson said that unemployment estimates are based in part on surveys, which have margins of error. "The rates aren't precise enough for the one-tenth of a percentage point difference to mean much, but it is noteworthy that we're at least nearing territory that we haven't seen since the early '80s."

Unlike the Lower 48 economy, Alaska's is still growing, although barely. The state's employers had 308,800 people on the payroll in February, 2,600 more than a year earlier, the state Labor Department said last week.

But the Alaska unemployment rate has climbed sharply since last fall. And claims for unemployment insurance soared 12 percent in February compared with the same month of last year.

"The unemployment rate has been rising for months, but the payroll job numbers are now beginning to show weakness," Robinson said. "The oil and gas industry has seen its job counts level off after several years of strong growth. Without that growth, Alaska will have a hard time avoiding the job losses afflicting most of the rest of the country."

He and Fried have predicted the state will join the national recession later this year.