Follow-up to my post #356493(*):
Welcome to Norway --Europe's Saudi Arabia... where the idle rich are laughing all the way to the oil rig!
Now flush, Norway turns tables on Sweden
By Ivar Ekman
Published: November 5, 2007
OSLO Long a poor cousin in Scandinavia, Norway has surpassed Sweden to become one of the richest countries in the world and a magnet for young Swedes ready to work hard to make a quick - and rather big - buck.
"When I was young, Swedes had whiter teeth, clearer skin, ABBA and Bjorn Borg. We had lots fish, and not much more," said Thomas Hylland Eriksen, professor of social anthropology at the University of Oslo.
"Today, Swedes have been cut down to size, and I would say that many Norwegians enjoy the fact that so many Swedes are here doing menial jobs."
In the years following World War II, in which Norway had been occupied by Nazi Germany and Sweden had stayed neutral, leaving its industrial base intact, Sweden's economy grew at a breakneck speed. Workers came from all over Europe, and not least from Norway, to fill the factories, shipyards and constructions sites of the boom years.
But in the 1980s, Sweden's economy started to stumble and the vast welfare state that had been built up in the post-war years began to show cracks.
At the same time, the oil that Norway had found in the North Sea in the 1970s began to have a serious positive impact on the country's economic growth. By the early 1990s, just as Sweden was entering a deep recession, Norway's boom years began in earnest.
The Norwegian GDP per capita, which had stood at 80 percent of Sweden's for much of the post-war period, soared past it in 1991, and never looked back. In 2006, the average GDP at purchasing power parity for a Norwegian stood at a whopping $53,000, with Sweden's at a humbler $34,000, according to the OECD. In 2006, Norway was the third biggest exporter of oil in the world, after Saudi Arabia and Russia.
This has meant that migration of workers across the border between the two countries has reversed. While the numbers of Norwegians living in Sweden has fallen drastically since 1990, the number of Swedes in Norway almost doubled between 1990 and 2007, from 18,000 to more than 35,000. Studies have also shown that the number of Swedes commuting to work in Norway has grown quickly.
Following the laws of supply and demand, there are no signs that the flow is slowing down.
"The availability of cheap labor contributes to the growth in the Norwegian economy," said Knut Anton Mork, chief economist at the Handelsbanken bank. "It is not as extreme as in some of the Middle Eastern emirates - and I don't think Swedes want to be viewed in the same light - but economically the same elements are in place."
The Oslo headquarters of this "cheap labor" is the Swedish Association, in the heavily immigrant Storgata neighborhood.
Apart from renting out about 300 beds in apartments in the area around the Association's office - the reason a local radio station recently dubbed the adjacent Brugata a "Swedish ghetto" - it also offers its members counseling on how to make their way around Norwegian society and, most importantly, how to find work.
"Right now, it's pretty slow," Josefine Karlsson, who works for the Association, said about the current waiting list of about 300. During the busiest times of the year, at the end of the summer and in January, as many as a thousand can be on the list, she said.
Most of those who come are between 18 and 25, and are prepared to work hard. According to Mikael Svensson, a Swede who recruits countrymen for the staffing company Adecco, Swedes are very popular among Norwegian employers.
"They are young and hungry," he said, ready to work long hours in challenging jobs that most young Norwegians spurn. Swedes won't have to wait more than a week before they have a job, he added.
Many, like 22-year-old Jenny Eriksson, work in warehouses, packing foodstuffs. Others, like Sofia Falk, 21, and Pernilla Bergstrom, 19, work in the restaurant industry. Even if they say that Oslo is a nice place to live, both admit that the money - between 120 and 250 kronor, or $22 to $46, per hour for the kind of jobs most Swedes do, close to double the pay in Sweden - is what drew them here.
While some quickly adapt to life in Oslo, and end up spending most of the money they earn, others live very frugal lives. "We don't shop, we don't go out, and we eat mainly noodles," said Pernilla Bergström, who works at a McDonald's in Storgata. She said she would use the money she saved to travel for several months in Asia, and to fund future studies in Sweden.
Most Swedes say the don't feel at all discriminated against by the Norwegians. Apart from economics, the two peoples remain "brothers," with very similar languages and cultures.
But Josefin Karlsson at the Swedish Association admits to being a bit miffed by seeing an advert for an apartment for rent, which claimed that it would be good for "Swedes or Poles." "Nothing bad about Poles, but that's not really how we see ourselves," she said.
As for the Norwegians, even if they admit to a certain sense of glee from having their former "bigger brother" packing their food and making their coffee, they try to be magnanimous about it. "One can feel some joy about Norway doing better than Sweden," said Lars Ostby, a researcher with the Statistics Norway agency. "But we've won on lottery, and you don't win on lottery because you deserve it."
iht.com
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