Oil management: Norway’s example

Norwegian children are taught at school that Norway was Europe‘s most impoverished country in 1905, when the Norwegians unilaterally dissolved their royal union with Sweden and declared full independence. This is not quite true, however, because Finland and Iceland at the time were poorer still than Norway. A hundred years later, however, the five Nordic countries had formed an economic cluster sharing a similar standard of life, with Norway leading the pack. In Denmark, Finland, Iceland, and Sweden, per capita GDP in 2005 amounted to USD 32,000 to USD 35,000 compared with USD 42,000 in Norway and the United States; these figures are adjusted for purchasing power parity to account for differences in the cost of living across countries.