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Comment by fxj | Hacker News Reader

Why does it work in Norway? It is among the list of the highest GDP per capita in the world. Norway rank 6, US rank 10. (IMF)

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In Norway the names of those who checked your taxes is logged and displayed to you, so bosses checking their employees' taxes wouldn't be the wisest move - it would look really weird.

You can of course get semi-anonymity by paying someone else to perform the search for you, but it's not really done much. Companies are generally nicer in Norway anyway, likely due to our lack of minimum wage, CLAs and tripartite cooperation model.

Maybe it's this, but there is also a fair amount of oil in Norway.

From wikipedia [1]:

The petroleum industry accounts for around a quarter of the country's gross domestic product (GDP).On a per-capita basis, Norway is the world's largest producer of oil and natural gas outside of the Middle East.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norway

Your argument does not apply that this would give potential employers too much leverage in salary negotiations or can you explain?

Ah, I though you were suggesting that the GDP per capita in Norway was high because of tax transparency.

Now I realize that you were probably just saying that Norway and US are comparable in terms of GDP per capita. Am I correct?

You can replace Norway with Iceland if you'd like. No oil there.

My guess: very small income gap.

But how was that very small gap created? Maybe such kind of policies played a role?

Decent managing of oil resources defnitely played a role there. Also, Norway is a small and still pretty homogenous country. They probably feel at least in some level that they are in the same boat together, something that is hard to achieve when you just (almost) randomly mix millions of people from all over the world like in the U.S.

Gini Coefficient for Norway and the US:

US: 18.5 Norway: 6.5

The ratio of the average income of the richest 10% to the poorest 10%

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