Bjørn Stabell 白熊

Sipping a US$ 13 beer I cannot help but feel Norwegian again, even if the beer is a Kilkenny.

There are of course many contrasts between Norway, my home country, and Beijing, where I spent the last 8 years of my life.

Norway is very rich in natural resources—espically in oil, which has seen some growth recently—has a small population, and a “Robin Hood” social democracy.

The entire population is one big affluent middle class; nobody’s rich, nobody’s poor. With overtime pay the cleaning staff of my school made more money than the head of education in my county, even if they were both working about the same number of hours. This is perhaps as close to the communist ideal as you can find in a materialistic world, making Norway the 2^nd highest GDP per capita in the world, and the 1^st in terms of human development accoring to the UN.

And when the oil prices crash? Well, Norway’s saving its money in a petroleum fund, currently at US$ 245 billion.

This lack of income disparity has one very apparent effect: services become very expensive. Combined with a weak dollar and yen it’s perhaps no wonder Oslo surpassed Tokyo as the most expensive city in the world.  Swedes are taking over a lot of the service jobs as they know the language, the pay is better, and the working hours less than back home; as much as 2 hours less per day for, e.g., nurses.

Here’s a quick a dirty chart of the costs of some items in Norway and Beijing, all converted to US$ for easy comparison:

Huge taxes on gas and cars combined with high wages explains the big difference in cab fares. Kilkenny is an import in both countries, and only the service is really different, meaning less difference overall; electronics are even closer in price. Installing a stone wall involves a lot of service: some digging, transportation, installation, and cleanup, thus the big price difference; there’s certainly no lack of raw material (stone) in Norway.

So if you want to see what it’s like when the world is completely flat—when globalization has had its way and equalized all wage disparities—head to Norway. Be sure to bring enough plastic money, though.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 1st, 2006 at 1:58 am and is filed under Exoweb, China, Family, Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.