The curse of being oil-rich

aftenposten-090302Ah…the complacency of being oil rich. So complacent, in fact, that we forget about our infrastructure. That’s the picture painted by the Norwegian newspaper aftenposten.no this morning, in their seemingly never-ending series of articles about the increasingly delapidated Norwegian road network. The reason for why things are the way they are: The literally well-oiled economy.

A matter of prioritization

Instead of prioritizing infrastructure development, like many other countries , Norway has put much of its oil revenues into the social welfare system, hospitals, education, schools, kindergardens and so on.  Although this has resulted in one of the world’s best social welfare systems, it has neglected building better roads, which by many is seen as THE prerequisite for a contry’s economy.

The result

Norway has some 8500 kms of  “major highways” (“stamveg” in Norwegian), important links between regions or between population centers in a region. Merely 8% of these are classified as having a full appropriate standard, 56% are classified as below acceptance levels. No wonder people complain…



Without roads, businesses are facing high transportation costs, which makes them less competitive. Besides the fact that we consumers end up having to pay more for their services. And more for our own travels.

Related

Posted in THIS and THAT
Tags: , ,

ARTICLES and PAPERS
Supply chain management - the new research cocktail?
Supply Chain Management needs a new way to pursue research, a new way that is focused on theory buil[...]
Call for papers: Risk Management in Supply Chains
Operational research has become one of the most indispensable tools in business. Modelling and analy[...]
BOOKS and BOOK CHAPTERS
Book Review: Managing Supply Chain Risk and Vulnerability
Another book by someone from the ISCRiM group? No, not this time, or perhaps, yes, after all. Managi[...]
Book Review: Supply Chain Risk
A comment on a a previous book review - Supply Chain Risk Managament by Donald Waters - prompted me [...]
REPORTS and WHITEPAPERS
Transport infrastructure resilience
Is it possible to devise a simple framework for assessing the resilience of the transport infrastruc[...]
Highway Vulnerability and Criticality Assessment
Transportation vulnerability and resilience have been the focus of this blog for the past two days, [...]