The European competition rules restrict governments’ opportunity to differentiate terms of energy accessibility among firms and industries. This easily runs counter with regional and industrial goals of national energy policies. Norway levies a tax on use of electricity, but exempts main...

Research and development (R&D) play a pivotal role for innovation and productivity growth, and knowledge spillovers can make the case for public support to private R&D. In small and open economies, absorption of foreign knowledge through exports and imports can be even more decisive for economic...

The Norwegian pension reform of 2006 intends to (1) improve long run fiscal sustainability by reducing the growth in public old-age expenditures, (2) strengthen labour supply incentives, and (3) maintain the main redistributive features of the present system. We assess to what extent the reform...

Large petroleum revenues make Norway an enviable fiscal loner. The fiscal policy rule adopted from 2001 transforms petroleum wealth into foreign assets, and only the real return on the financial fund should be spent annually. Despite this ambitious saving of the petroleum wealth, we find it...

Ageing combined with generous welfare state schemes makes the present fiscal policy in Norway unsustainable, despite large government petroleum revenues. We estimate to what extent two suggested reforms of the public pension system improve fiscal sustainability and stimulate employment, two main...

The paper derives a general equilibrium demand function for electricity by imposing a specific closure rule on a large CGE-model of the Norwegian economy. By a decomposition technique it quantifies the contribution from various mechanisms to the price sensitivity of aggregate electricity demand....

Evidence points to relatively low supply elasticities for workers skilled for research and development (R&D), which can hamper innovation and growth. Increasing the supply of R&D skills will expand an economy's innovative capacity. A simultaneous effect of increased education, which is...

Publicly announced GHG mitigation targets and emissions pricing strategies by individual governments may suffer from inherent commitment problems. When emission prices are perceived as short-lived, socially cost-effective upfront investment in climate technologies may be hampered. This paper...