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Well, sure. And Sweden and Denmark have pretty comparable GDPs to the US, and Finland is notably lower than the US. What's your narrative here? Is the Norway
by aetherson 10y ago
Well, sure. And Sweden and Denmark have pretty comparable GDPs to the US, and Finland is notably lower than the US.
What's your narrative here? Is the Norway vs. Sweden difference due to something OTHER than oil? They're very similar countries! If you're seeing the Norway vs. Sweden thing as due to something other than oil, what are you arguing is unique to Norway? If you do agree that Norway's GDP/capita advantage over its neighbors is due to oil, you have to accept that a resource advantage that produces a few thousand dollars/year in direct purchase, basically stimulates AD to the point where the entire economy goes up and snowballs into a few tens of thousands of dollars per year.
To be clear, I don't think that our views are wildly distinct. I'm not a hater of the Nordic countries. But Norway is an outlier from the other Nordics, and the only plausible explanation I can come up with for its outlier status is oil. So I don't think it's a very useful reference point.
- niftich 10y agoNorway and Sweden are different in a few ways. Norway is a NATO member but not an EU member, meaning it participates in a military alliance while protecting its large fishery and insulating its oil economy from the EU. Sweden is the opposite, it's an EU member but not a NATO member, favoring military independence and looser cooperation while being an integral part of the EU. Consequently, Sweden has been historically much more welcoming of immigrants (including, to borrow Canadian terminology, 'visible minorities'), while Norway has been less so. Despite this, since Sweden has almost double the population of Norway, Norway's percentage of immigrants per total residents is actually slightly higher. In Norway's case, oil makes a wealth of difference.