The governor of the Norwegian central bank, Norges Bank, yesterday told an audience at the Harvard Kennedy School that his country's petroleum industry "both provides exposure to an entire global economy and shields us from the current low growth environment across the OECD area".

In a speech outlining Norges Bank's role in nurturing a stable economy and stewarding revenues from the hydrocarbons industry, Øystein Olsen added that it is "too early to say whether Norway has managed to establish a