Due to her offshore oil reserves, Norway is the richest country in all of Scandinavia. However, as a result of the current oil wars as a part of geopolitical conflict, her economy has taken a hit and is beginning to decline.
Norway risks sinking into a recession for the first time since the financial crisis of 2008, after a collapse in oil prices added to the threat of an export slump.
The government of western Europe’s biggest petroleum producer, which is also the richest Nordic economy, is already looking into how best to apply stimulus measures to fight the effect of the coronavirus on trade and travel. But there may be a need to do more to counter the potentially more damaging fallout of an oil crisis.
“If the economy is lower, there could be room to spend more money. But we will come back to whether we do that, and how much the measures we’re now implementing will cost,” Prime Minister Erna Solberg said in an interview in Oslo. She said her administration may need to revise its October budget, as assumptions of above-trend growth start to look badly out of step with reality. (source)
What one must wait to see will be the effects this has on the German economy.
Norway is important, but what matters most of the Germanic nations is the heart itself, since Germany is the economic heart of Europe and the fourth largest economy in the world. If she goes down, Europe goes down, and given that this is coming at a time of the coronavirus epidemic and another forced migration crisis, it would have massive effects on European politics, swinging it to the hard right.
In Norway’s situation, while she is known to be very liberal, she also has many supporters of National Socialism. One should watch to see if the economic declines, coupled with migration and refugees, will result in a rise of nationalist sentiments and even national socialism.