As the sun plunges into the Oslofj ord on a winter evening, passersby stop outside Norway’s new €620m ($653m) national art gallery, the new €300m Munch Museum, the new €240m public library and the €550m opera house to take in the dying light.
Thanks to oil and gas reserves in the waters off its coast, Norway is extremely rich – and getting richer. Already the World Bank’s seventh wealthiest country by GDP per capita at the start of last year, the resource-rich Scandinavian country’s profits ballooned to record levels over the past 12 months, as prices on the energy markets tripled due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Norway replaced Moscow as Europe’s largest supplier of gas.
But the nation’s wealth can be an intangible affair. Hakon Midtsundstad, 33, his mother, Elin, and her sister, Berit, have stopped at the Oslo waterfront to
