Trillion dollar baby

An account of how a small nation responded to the discovery of oil off its coastline in 1969. Rather than squandering the profits, Norway put in place the most robust and visionary framework for extracting maximum benefit from non-renewable resources found anywhere. As a result, Norway has the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world, a savings strategy that has taken a non-renewable resource and turned it into a financial asset that can last forever. Paul Cleary is a senior writer at the Australian newspaper, where he has specialised in covering the natural resources boom, particularly in the oil industry.