Norway's oil fund avoided Dutch disease by investing abroad

Norway discovered oil off its coast in 1969, and by the 1980s and 1990s North Sea production was generating cash flows large relative to the country's small, 5.5-million-person economy. Economists had a well-documented name for what typically happened next in resource-rich countries: "Dutch disease," where a resource windfall spent directly into the domestic economy pushes up the local currency, making every other export industry — fishing, manufacturing, shipping — less competitive on world markets, and often triggers unsustainable spending booms that leave the economy worse off once resource

Norway's parliament established the Petroleum Fund in 1990 as a fiscal tool for managing the transition of oil revenue into the economy responsibly, though it received no capital until reforms were in place; the fund took its first actual deposit in 1996 and was later renamed the Government Pension Fund Global in 2006.