Why Did Norway Get Rich From Oil But Britain Never Did?

Why did Norway get rich from oil, but Britain never did? In 1969 the average Briton was richer than the average Norwegian. Then both countries struck oil in the same sea, about a year apart. Today Norway's oil fund is worth more than $2.2 trillion. Britain has no oil fund at all. This is the story of North Sea oil told through one map: the 1965 median line that split the seabed, the Ekofisk discovery in 1969 and BP's Forties field in 1970, Norway's Ten Oil Commandments and the birth of Statoil (now Equinor), the secret McCrone report on Scottish oil, Thatcher-era unemployment and the sale of Britoil, the Dutch disease, the Piper Alpha and Alexander L. Kielland disasters, and how Norway's Government Pension Fund Global (Oljefondet) came to own about 1.5% of every listed company in the world. If Britain pumped more oil than Norway for most of the 1980s, where did all that money go? Subscribe to Neighbors Apart for two neighbors, one border, and the map behind the money. Chapters 0:00 The well nobody wanted 1:03 A sea for fish 1:50 One more well 2:26 Britain needed a rescue 2:56 The Ten Oil Commandments 3:39 Seventy-eight percent 4:08 The man from Basra 4:41 The secret report 5:11 Spending the windfall 5:51 The Dutch disease 6:25 The price in the sea 6:53 The first two billion 7:37 The island that saved 8:06 The tide goes out 8:42 The honest part 9:11 The scorecard 9:45 Back to 1969 Watch next: Switzerland vs Austria :    • Why Did Switzerland Get Rich But Austria N...   Sources : Satellite imagery: Sentinel-2 cloudless 2016 by EOX IT Services GmbH (contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data 2016), CC BY 4.0. Elevation and bathymetry: AWS Terrain Tiles (Mapzen). Borders and coastlines: Natural Earth. GDP data: Maddison Project Database 2023, World Bank. Illustrations: Canva. Music: original, made for this channel. #norway #NorthSeaOil #economics #britain