Norway in 2010Article Free Pass
The Norwegian economy in 2010 showed signs of slowly recovering from the impact of the international downturn of the previous few years. Financial indicators pointed to a positive investment trend and to healthy growth in production on the Norwegian mainland, and the unemployment rate was stable at 3.5%. Partly because low rents in response to the broader European recession allowed young Norwegian families to save for home purchases, housing prices continued to climb. Indeed, the main economic trend in Norway was the accrual of personal savings.
Although declining oil production reduced revenue for the state slightly, revenues from oil and gas production continued to be funneled into the Government Pension Fund–Global (GPFG). Notwithstanding global financial problems, the GPFG was still growing, having attained a market value of about $450 billion. Yet after two years of antirecessionary policies, the government announced a reduction in the proportion of petroleum revenue that would be used to stimulate the economy, with the intent of bringing the deficit back down to 4% of GPFG. Some export sectors faced challenges as a result of the economic difficulties besetting Norway’s main trading European partners.
A cold winter led to high electrical heating costs, especially for households in the middle of the country, which seemed to be paying the price for the region’s recent investment in its new coastal oil-related industries. Unforeseen technological problems with the carbon-neutral gas plants on the western coast delayed full-scale dioxide cleansing. When Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg’s government announced that it had abandoned its ambition of carbon-neutral gas production by 2011, it was severely criticized for not having provided favourable conditions for producing clean renewable energy from wind, sun, and waves. The government was also the target of protests against planned hydroelectric power lines that would run along Hardanger Fjord to Bergen.
In the wake of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, plans for gas and oil exploration in the ecologically vulnerable Lofoten-Vesterålen archipelago were shelved by the Red-Green coalition government at least until the next scheduled general election in 2013. In April Norway and Russia reached an agreement on maritime use of the Barents Sea and the Arctic Ocean; the pact was signed in Murmansk in September. Negotiations on the matter had been going on between the two countries for 40 years. Under the terms of the agreement, an area of about 175,000 sq km (about 67,600 sq mi) was divided in half. Norway and Russia also agreed to continue to cooperate on fisheries and hydrocarbon exploration in the future; however, environmentalists and fishermen warned of the potential hazards of petroleum exploitation of the area.
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