Saqqummersitaq

Over the past decade, Greenland has lifted and restored its ban on uranium mining amid the uncertainty of global uranium prices. This article investigates the dynamic interrelations between uranium commodity prices and the impacts of structural shocks, sketching key economic implications for Greenland. Using a structural vector autoregressive model, this work analyses the changing relations between uranium prices, coal prices as well as real and financial variables from 1980 to 2019. The main findings are that the dynamics of uranium spot prices are diversely affected by shocks in combined real GDP, total electricity production from nuclear power, the interest rate, the real effective exchange rate, and the price of coal. The estimates also show that the pricing dynamics are important for future production and capital investment decisions. The analysis illustrates that despite the prevailing depressed uranium market, Greenland can still capitalize on future market developments. The country can anticipate benefiting from a short-run world supply disruption, a positive combination of macroeconomic shocks, and the long-term expansion of nuclear energy programs.

The long-term economic performance of Greenland has been shaped by factors like climate change and global commodity prices but more importantly by the change and persistence of economic and political institutions. This chapter discusses the combination of these factors ranging from natural-resource transitions, historical legacies, and state developmental policies. It provides a general overview to understand the interplay of endogenous and exogenous factors that have influenced the historical evolution of the Greenlandic economy.

The environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis assumes there is an inverted U-shape relationship between pollution and income per capita, implying an improvement in environmental quality when a growing economy reaches a high level of economic development. This study evaluated empirically the existence of the environmental Kuznets curve in Greenland for the period 1970–2018. Using an autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) approach, the results show evidence of a U-shaped EKC in Greenland instead of the hypothesized inverted U-shape. The findings indicate that Greenland had initially experienced a decoupling transition during an early development stage associated with structural conditions of a small subsistence economy. However, once the country began to expand its industry, the trend began to reverse, creating a positive and significant relationship between CO2 emissions and GDP per capita that are potentially detrimental to the Arctic natural environment.

In this paper I analyse historical interpretations and elements of the coloniality of power and gender in the historiography of Greenland. I discuss new uses and methods of analysis looking to describe historical documents without reinforcing the Eurocentric view within them. Moreover, I employ Protestant church’s historical registers of marriages of various Greenlandic towns (Nuuk, Qaqortoq, Qeqertasuaq and Aasiaat) to explore issues of gender inequality during the colonial period seeking to disentangle modern presumptions of colonial gender relations in Greenland.