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Comment by raheemm | Hacker News Reader

If you compare Norway to the UAE (which includes Dubai, Abu Dhabi, etc) while Norway is investing its oil wealth in a sovereign fund, UAE is investing in real estate, tourism and other sectors. Both have rich social safety nets. In this way, both these energy exporting nations are smart in reinvesting/saving today's surplus. One interesting difference is that UAE is a federation of fairly autonomous states or emirates. So some states are already in the post-scarcity era (Dubai) while other states are still in the surplus era (Abu Dhabi, Ras Al Khiamah, etc). It makes for an interesting economic development scenario.

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Yes, but wheras Dubai employs slave labor to build ecological atrocities, Norway is investing the money in the future of its people. It is also quite interesting that dealing with middle-eastern immigrants is a controversial issue in Norway (especially because they largely refuse to assimilate.)

Slave labor is wrong. Dubai is wrong for using it. So is anyone else who does. Norway rightly deserves credit in this regard. My initial comment is from a macro-economic point of view of how countries use/abuse their natural resources.

but norway is debt-free (accourding tfa)

i'm not sure about uae, especially dubai

Good point. I quickly did a google check and UAE does have debt but could not find percentage of GDP figures or how they compare with other countries.

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...

That list says that Norway's public debt is 52% of GDP.

(It puts the UK at 47%, and the UAE at 22%.)

A lot of that is due to the fact that a large percentage of Norwegians are homeowners, and when a 1 bedroom apartment in Oslo can easily cost more than $200,000, well, that will add up quickly.

Their government has 350 billion / 4.7 million = 74,468$ in their oil fund per person including children. So the average person would need to be holding over 100,000$ in debt (including children) for that to balance out which seems fishy to me.

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