Why is Norway so wealthy for its size?

Oil found in the North Sea in 1969, and then an unusual decision about what to do with it. Norway put the revenue into a sovereign wealth fund rather than into spending, capped how much of it government may draw each year at roughly the expected real return, and invested the rest abroad. The fund now holds well over a trillion dollars and owns something in the region of 1.5 per cent of all listed shares on Earth.

Investing abroad was the deliberate part. Spending oil money at home would have pushed up the currency and wages and hollowed out every other export industry - the resource curse, which had already been demonstrated by the Netherlands after its own gas discoveries, and which economists named Dutch disease for exactly that reason. Keeping the money outside the domestic economy was the defence against it.

It has also become an awkward moral instrument. A fund that size cannot invest neutrally, so Norway maintains an ethics council that excludes companies over weapons, tobacco, coal and human rights, and its divestments move markets. A country of five and a half million people is, through its pension fund, one of the largest shareholders in the world economy - and has to have a published opinion about most of it.