Norway's Economic Success

There's an interesting article in the NYT today. This sentence just about sums it all up:

Norway is a relatively small country with a largely homogeneous population of 4.6 million and the advantages of being a major oil exporter.

The Norwegians have been great managers of their wealth, and I do not wish to take away from their hard work, but their success has much to do with factors essentially outside their control. Norway's homogeneity minimizes the effects of ethnic or religious conflict, while its small population allows for much better management. In addition, it is fortunate because:

1) It is located in a region that has not seen strife in decades.

2) Its relative isolation from the rest of the world, or rather, its relative independence, is something inconceivable for larger countries such as the US. Look at Japan, which is culturally isolationist but whose economic stature nevertheless forces it to engage with the rest of the world more aggressively.

3) It has benefited from the enormous economies of America, Europe, and Asia. Norway, with its moderately sized economy, has much more room to maneuver within the global economy, even in depressed times. Where can America turn to, when its own economy accounts for a quarter of the world's and is in tatters?

Ships in the Port of Singapore

Ok, so this is pretty much one of the most interesting articles I've recently read about the Global Economic Crisis, in large part because of the image I have in my mind of the vast number of ships off Singapore.

Tidbits:

Hundreds of cargo ships — 100,000 to 300,000 tons each, with the larger ones weighing more than the entire 130-ship Spanish Armada — bob so empty that they seem to perch on top of the water rather than in it, their red rudders and bulbous noses, submerged when the vessels are loaded, sticking a dozen feet out of the water.

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So many vessels have flocked to Singapore because it has few storms, excellent ship repair teams, cheap bunker fuel from its own refinery and, most important, proximity to Asian ports that might eventually have cargo to ship.

The gathering of so many freighters “is extraordinary," said Christopher Palsson, a senior consultant at Lloyd’s Register-Fairplay Research, a London-based ship tracking service, "we have probably not witnessed anything like this since the early 1980s,” during the last big bust in the global shipping industr.

The world’s fleet has nearly doubled since the early 1980s, so the tonnage of vessels in and around Singapore’s waters this spring may be the highest ever, he said, cautioning that detailed worldwide ship tracking data has only been available for the last five years.

The Greeks and Persians had more vessels -- around 1,000 triremes -- at the Battle of Salamis in 480 B.C., Kublai Khan had more boats during his attempted invasion of Japan in 1281 and the Allies assembled more ships for the D-Day invasion in 1944. But those vessels were mostly tiny compared with the behemoths here.

These vessels total more than 41 million tons, according to Lloyd’s Register. That is nearly equal to the entire world’s merchant fleet at the end of World War I, and represents almost 4 percent of the world’s fleet today.

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There were 150 vessels in and around the Straits of Gibraltar on Monday, and 300 around Rotterdam, according to Lloyd’s Register.

But Singapore, close to Asian markets, has attracted far more.

“It is a sign of the times,” said Martin Stopford, the managing director of Clarkson Research Service in London, “that Asia is the place you want to hang around this time in case things turn around.”

Full Article Here.

Just incredible. What strikes me is that even examples from military history are inadequate to account for the gathering of ships caused by the economic downturn.