Norway
Profile written September 2026 · figures updated nightly
Where things stand
The latest published reading for each measure, with the last five years beside it.
01Structure
Norway is the only economy on this site that is a large net energy exporter, and its statistics are built around separating that fact from everything else. Norwegian analysis routinely uses mainland GDP, which excludes petroleum extraction and shipping, because the oil and gas sector's output swings with prices in a way that says nothing about the rest of the country.1
Petroleum contributes roughly a eighth of GDP, about a seventh of government revenue and over a third of exports.2 The mainland economy beside it is services, fisheries and aquaculture, metals refined with cheap hydroelectricity, and a maritime engineering cluster that grew out of the offshore industry.
Manufacturing is under seven per cent of value added, the lowest share here — an economy with this much resource income does not need one, which is the classic mechanism behind a strong currency crowding out tradable industry.
02Trade and exposure
Exports are close to half of output and are dominated by oil, gas, seafood and metals. After 2022 Norway became western Europe's largest gas supplier, replacing Russian volumes into Germany and beyond — the counterpart to the dependency described on the German and Austrian pages.
The composition means Norwegian export earnings move with commodity prices rather than with foreign demand for Norwegian products. A European energy crisis raises Norwegian income; a European recovery in energy supply lowers it.
03Energy and resources
Norway's energy import dependency is deeply negative — it produces many times the energy it consumes — and its domestic electricity is almost entirely hydroelectric.1 Very few economies generate essentially all their power from one renewable source and export fossil fuels at the same time.
The tension in that position is domestic and political: interconnectors to Britain and the continent link Norwegian electricity prices to European ones, so the same exports that earn the country its income also raise what Norwegians pay at home.
04Labour and demography
Around eighty per cent of 20- to 64-year-olds are in work and youth unemployment is near twelve per cent. Wages are set through coordinated bargaining in which the exposed manufacturing sector settles first and sets the frame for the rest — an arrangement designed to keep wage growth tied to what the tradable sector can bear despite the petroleum income beside it.
The long-run pressure is the same as elsewhere in the Nordics: an ageing population and a public sector that has grown with the petroleum revenue, needing more workers than a shrinking cohort can supply.
05Public finances
Norway saves its petroleum revenue rather than spending it. The state's net cash flow from the sector is transferred into the Government Pension Fund Global, which passed two trillion dollars in early 2026 and is the world's largest sovereign wealth fund.3
Spending from it is governed by the fiscal rule: over the cycle, the budget may use the expected real return of the fund, set at three per cent since 2017 after an expert commission judged the earlier four per cent too generous for a lower-return world.2 The 2026 budget proposes using about 2.8 per cent of the fund's value.3
The rule is the whole design. It converts a depleting resource into a permanent income, and it insulates the budget from the oil price — which is why Norway's public finances do not appear in any list of European fiscal problems.
06Money and prices
Norges Bank sets the rate shown above and targets two per cent inflation. Norway is not in the European Union, though it is in the single market through the European Economic Area, and the krone floats.
The exchange rate does much of the stabilising work: when oil prices fall, the krone usually weakens, which cushions the mainland economy's exporters. The awkward case is the one where a weak krone and high imported inflation arrive together, since the currency is then transmitting the shock rather than absorbing it.
07What the models expect
These are computed on this site from each series' own history, and are nobody's official projection. The bar is the range the figure lands in half the time; the dot is the central path.
Replayed from past origins on today's revised figures, the same baseline was usually off by 0.53 on consumer price inflation, 1.47 on real gdp, 0.33 on unemployment rate, 0.18 on central bank policy rate, 3.87 on government debt.
08Structural indicators
The figures behind the sections above. They move by a point or two a year, so each carries the year it was measured.
| Measure | Value | Year | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Industry, share of gross value added | 6.7% | 2025 | Eurostat |
| Exports, share of GDP | 45.6% | 2025 | Eurostat |
| Energy import dependency | −677% | 2024 | Eurostat |
| R&D spending, share of GDP | 1.7% | 2024 | Eurostat |
| Employment rate, ages 20–64 | 79.5% | 2025 | Eurostat |
| Youth unemployment rate | 12.1% | Jul 2026 | Eurostat |
| Government Pension Fund Global | >$2tn | 2026 | NBIM |
| Fiscal rule, spending from the fund | 3% | since 2017 | Ministry of Finance |
09Sources and method
Live figures: Eurostat, Bank for International Settlements, OECD via DBnomics. Each is fetched nightly and validated before publication; the delivery report on /status/ says how old every one of them is. Profile written 2026-09-12, next review September 2027.
- Mainland GDP, and the hydroelectric basis of domestic power — OECD Economic Surveys: Norway 2026
- The petroleum sector's share of output, revenue and exports, and the fiscal rule — Norwegian Petroleum, government revenues; Norwegian Petroleum, management of revenues
- The size of the fund and the 2026 budget's withdrawal — OilPrice, Norway's 2026 budget