The IMF Working Papers series is designed to make IMF staff research available to a wide audience. With nearly 300 released each year, working papers cover a wide range of theoretical and analytical topics, including balance of payments, monetary and fiscal issues, global liquidity, and national and international economic developments.
Based on a permanent income analysis, Gagnon (2018) has prominently suggested that Norway
has saved too much, thereby free-riding on the rest of the world for demand. Our public sector
balance sheet analysis comes to the opposite conclusion, chiefly because it also accounts for
future aging costs. Unsurprisingly, we find that Norway's current assets exceed its liabilities by
some 340 percent of mainland GDP. But its nonoil fiscal deficits have grown very large (to almost
8 percent of mainland GDP) and aging pressures are only commencing. Therefore, Norway's
intertemporal financial net worth (IFNW) is negative, at about -240 percent of mainland GDP. As
IFNW represents an intertemporal budget constraint, this implies that Norway's savings are likely
insufficient to address aging costs without additional fiscal action.
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