AbstractsEconomics

This thesis looks to explain why Norway and Alberta differ in their choices of natural resource revenue allocation. Norway saves most revenues in a government owned fund abroad, while Alberta leaves more revenue to be handled by the market and spends government derived rents on running provincial costs. Both cases keep vast amounts of oil and gas and production volumes of these resources are about equal for the two. Alberta and Norway also display similarities on several other independent variables, which makes a ‘most similar case’ comparison suitable. The cases differ on the independent variables – political culture and political institutional structure. These two variables will be employed in an attempt to understand why policy outcomes differ so fundamentally in the two cases. The political culture of Alberta is described by the concept of western alienation which inherits distrust in government, and the right to free enterprise. The Norwegian political culture is described by the notion of egalitarian individualism where unity and equality are important features. The political institutional structure of Alberta is in this thesis understood by the notion of neo-pluralism. Here business interests are expected to hold an advantage over other interest groups in society. For Norway democratic corporatism is being employed as descriptive of the political institutional structure. Following the theories, empirics and history presented, this thesis shows that the explanatory variables of political culture and political institutional structure are important for understanding the differences in policy outcomes in Alberta and Norway. Resource curse and Dutch disease theory will be employed, together with empirical numbers, to show why, or in what degree, Alberta and Norway are susceptible to these phenomena. The research will show that Alberta is, however mildly, in a larger degree disposed to the effects of the resource curse and the Dutch disease, than Norway. The level of susceptibility is closely linked to the choice of fund saving or not, thus political culture and political institutional structure become pertinent in understanding the reason for the differences.