The Alaska Model: A Republican Perspective

Abstract

Since 1982, each Alaskan has received an equal share of the returns to the Alaska Permanent Fund (APF), a publicly owned investment portfolio funded by the state’s oil revenue. These returns come in the form of a Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD) allocating an annual grant of roughly $1,200 to each man, woman, and child who meets the residency requirement.² The PFD is the sole example of a large-scale economic policy combining resource taxation—effectively transforming a depleting natural resource into a “sovereign wealth fund”—with the individual and unconditional distribution of (part of) the revenue stream to all resident shareholders. We call this the Alaska model.

We are grateful to the editors for the invitation to contribute to this volume, and to Simon Birnbaum, Mike Howard, Blain Neufeld, Cristian Perez, Philip Pettit, and Karl Widerquist for detailed written comments on an earlier draft. This paper was written under the auspices of the European Research Council’s Seventh Framework Program (FP7/2007-2013 / ERC / Agreement No 249438 — TRAMOD) (Casassas).