Norway's particularities
The state of Norway has ownership stakes in many of the country's largest publicly listed companies, owning 37% of the Oslo stockmarket[37] and operating the country's largest non-listed companies including Equinor and Statkraft. The Economist reports that "after the second world war the government nationalised all German business interests in Norway and ended up owning 44% of Norsk Hydro's shares. The formula of controlling business through shares rather than regulation seemed to work well, so the government used it wherever possible. 'We invented the
Chinese way of doing things before the Chinese', says Torger Reve of the Norwegian Business School".
[37]
The government also operates a sovereign wealth fund, the
Government Pension Fund of Norway—whose partial objective is to prepare Norway for a post-oil future, but "unusually among oil-producing nations, it is also a big advocate of human rights—and a powerful one, thanks to its control of the Nobel peace prize".
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