Nearly half of the world’s population now has Internet access, with over a billion more people coming online in the past five years alone. More and more advances in digitalisation and information technology can improve resource use in industries where productivity growth has so far been low. Retail trade and the financial sector in Norway have already shown that efficiency gains can also be achieved in traditional service industries. With the advent of driverless vehicles, the transport sector could well be the next to undergo a major transformation. A more integrated global econonomy – but an uncertain outlook International trade and cooperation have been drivers of global economic growth. Open borders are particularly important for an economy like Norway. They have given us access to technology and capital and put us in a position to exploit our own strengths in the production of goods and services. Much of the welfare gains we have experienced have come from reaping the benefits of 4/9  BIS central bankers' speeches  economic specialisation. Since the Second World War, the proponents of free trade have had the wind in their sails. Around 1950, international trade accounted for close to 20 percent of world GDP. Today, the share is three times that. This change has been politically willed. Customs duties have been lowered and trade barriers lifted. Technological advances have also enabled more and more goods and services to be traded across countries.
There has always been a considerable risk from having a large share of the nation’s wealth linked to a single commodity. But this share has fallen. Only a decade ago, oil and gas reserves made up two-thirds of Norway’s petroleum wealth. Today that share has dropped to about a third. Our aggregate wealth has become more diversified, which means we can tolerate slightly higher volatility in our financial wealth. The Government has today announced that it will propose an increase in the equity allocation in the oil fund to 70 percent. At the same time, the estimated expected real return on the oil fund is adjusted down to 3 percent. The choice of equity allocation is an important decision. But an even more important choice is the level of oil revenue spending. Fluctuations in the value of the fund present challenges for fiscal policy and for the fiscal rule. Let me comment somewhat further on this issue. The oil fund and the fiscal rule have long been important pillars of Norwegian economic policy. One key goal has been to preserve large parts of our petroleum wealth for future generations. There has also been an explicit desire to shield the Norwegian economy from swings in oil prices. Allow me to quote from the Revised National Budget for 1995: “Revenues from the petroleum sector vary more over time than other revenues.