But more specifically to this post, the UK and Norway both discovered oil in the North Sea around the same time and took very different approaches to hope to manage this new resource.
Norway treated the oil money like communal property and heavily taxed oil production. Norway used the taxes to further develop oil drilling and exploration technologies, so that they would still have access to harder to reach reserves in the future BUT more importantly the oil taxes had to benefit Norway as a whole after the oil is gone.
The most obvious result of this is the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund, which is basically an endowment with the intent to continue to improve the lives of all Norwegians for future generations. Norway uses the dividends from this massive investment portfolio to continually support the welfare state reducing the tax load on its citizens.
The UK, under Thatcher, just used the oil taxes to cut taxes elsewhere. The problem is, the easy to reach oil is long gone. The new technology to reach remaining oil reserves is increasingly expensive AND there’s no more oil money coming in. So now services are being cut and some politicians want to privatize others to make up the funding gaps.
There’s plenty of other factors at play, but at the end of the day the UK took a short term economy approach while Norway took a long term communal approach to the same scare resource at a similar point in time. Norway is still seeing the benefits to their approach while the UK has nothing to show for theirs.
It’s kinda is yes.
But more specifically to this post, the UK and Norway both discovered oil in the North Sea around the same time and took very different approaches to hope to manage this new resource.
Norway treated the oil money like communal property and heavily taxed oil production. Norway used the taxes to further develop oil drilling and exploration technologies, so that they would still have access to harder to reach reserves in the future BUT more importantly the oil taxes had to benefit Norway as a whole after the oil is gone.
The most obvious result of this is the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund, which is basically an endowment with the intent to continue to improve the lives of all Norwegians for future generations. Norway uses the dividends from this massive investment portfolio to continually support the welfare state reducing the tax load on its citizens.
The UK, under Thatcher, just used the oil taxes to cut taxes elsewhere. The problem is, the easy to reach oil is long gone. The new technology to reach remaining oil reserves is increasingly expensive AND there’s no more oil money coming in. So now services are being cut and some politicians want to privatize others to make up the funding gaps.
There’s plenty of other factors at play, but at the end of the day the UK took a short term economy approach while Norway took a long term communal approach to the same scare resource at a similar point in time. Norway is still seeing the benefits to their approach while the UK has nothing to show for theirs.