Following up on Alaska's economy and COVID-19, including a look at seasonal jobs and the first wave of elevated unemployment claims.

Answering initial questions about the virus' short-term economic impacts.

School-age children make up about 18 percent of Alaska today, down from a peak of 29.2 percent in 1970.

Alaska's population decreased 0.4 percent from July 2018 to July 2019, our new estimates show. The biggest drivers were a decline in the number of people moving to Alaska and fewer births.

Alaska added about 1,600 jobs in 2019 after losing more than 11,000 during the recession of the prior three years. We forecast that trend will continue this year, but at a slower rate of 0.3 percent, or about 1,100 new jobs.

After two years of big job losses, Alaska's construction industry started growing again in 2018 and continued adding jobs in 2019. It will likely take several years for the industry to recover lost ground, however.

Alaska's seafood harvesting employment dropped 4.9 percent in 2018, erasing most of the prior year's gains. While some fisheries added jobs, they weren't enough to offset the losses in salmon fishing, which represents the largest share of the state's harvesting employment.

As Alaska wrestles with an ongoing budget imbalance, one of the questions we face is how much government we want and need. One step toward making that policy decision is understanding how Alaska's government job numbers and wages line up with other states and why states differ.

Rents fell slightly in 2019 and vacancies rose, according to our annual survey of Alaska landlords. The increase in vacancies continues a three-year trend that has pushed the overall vacancy rate to a 10-year high of 8.6 percent. Rental costs and the broader housing market remained mostly stable throughout Alaska's recession (see the August 2018 issue of Trends), but the continued rise in vacancy suggests the state's weak economy is hurting the rental market.

While women represent nearly half of Alaska's workers and hold more of the positions requiring higher education, they earn 72 percent of what men make, on average. A number of factors influence the gender gap in wages, and many studies have tried to measure and explain them, but that type of analysis is outside this article's scope.