What country ever went wrong with a sovereign wealth fund? It is easy to envy Singapore and Norway – the latter of which now has £1.3 trillion squirrelled away, equivalent to £240,000 for every citizen. Britain would be in a much better situation now had it, like Norway, invested its windfall from the North Sea, rather than chucking it into the pot of general day-to-day expenditure. Paying state and public sector pensions liabilities out of tax revenue rather than from a long-term investment fund is going to become an ever more serious burden on the state.
We shouldn’t, then, sniff at Rachel Reeves’ idea for a ‘national wealth fund’. It is just that what the Chancellor has in mind is very different from what Norway has.
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