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...

We use a CGE model to estimate the social cost of a marginal increase in public expenditure in Norway. Norway exemplifies an economy with high taxes. Distortionary taxes imply wedges between the market prices and the corresponding shadow prices. The shadow prices are unobservable, which is the...

National and international expansion of transmission networks and diminishing returns to scale in hydropower capacity expansion has raised the opportunity cost of electricity. The resulting changes in comparative advantage between industries have in many countries been counteracted by government...

The paper analyses how equilibrium adjustments of the wage rate affect the scope for tax rate reductions when the government experiences an exogenous increase in non-tax revenues. It shows within a stylized model that increased revenue in the form of a tradable will increase the wage rate, which...

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...

This paper studies how productivity shifts at the level of the firm are transmitted to aggregate industry productivity in a model of heterogeneous firms. We analyse both uniform productivity shifts, and catching up by reducing the productivity differentials between firms. The two kinds of shifts...

Norway's petroleum wealth has become considerably more liquid and thereby visible to the public since the mid 1990s. In the policy debate transformation of wealth is often confused with ordinary income. Such a misconception may have contributed to de-industrialisation through real appreciation...

This paper assesses effects of the last decade’s multinational liberalisation of foreign trade, in terms of economic gains and in terms of pollution. By means of a disaggregated intertemporal CGE model for Norway two scenarios with and without the trade reforms are compared. Despite a slight...

We measure the effective assistance to 18 Norwegian private industries in 1989 caused by government budgetary subsidies, indirect commodity taxes, import protection through nominal tariffs and non-tariff-barriers, price discrimination of electricity and capital income taxation. The assistance...