A dramatic and disquieting capital flight from Norway is under way. Ever more Norwegian owners, investors and value creators are packing their bags and moving abroad.
The cause is obvious: the Norwegian tax level on private, national ownership has become relatively speaking extremely high. The combination of corporation taxes, a historically high dividend tax and the uniquely Norwegian wealth tax makes Norway the most expensive and most risky country in the OECD in which to run privately owned enterprise.
Recent surveys speak their clear language. Since 2020 more than 160 Norwegian business owners have moved to Switzerland alone. According to analyses the annual emigration of persons with fortunes above 100 million kroner increased by a staggering 518 per cent after the change of government in 2021, compared with the years before.
With this emigration hundreds of billions in private investment capital disappear. But the real dark figures concern the future.
How many potential entrepreneurs choose Norway away already at the idea stage in order to protect their life’s work? The signal that is sent to the entrepreneurial environments is catastrophic.
In the midst of this crisis great expectations were attached to the recently presented report from the Tax Commission (NOU 2026:9). The mandate was principally to contribute to the business sector coming better out of the locked situation, and to create a stable, predictable system.
But the result appears unfortunately as a toothless political compromise that offers very little operative new tax policy. By proposing a moderate lowering of the wealth-tax rate, but at the same time removing all valuation discounts on “working capital”, they give with one hand and take with the other. For many businesses the tax base will increase, and they do not touch the fundamental problem: that Norwegian owners are forced to drain their companies of liquidity in order to pay tax on machines, buildings and equipment – irrespective of whether they run with a surplus or a deficit.
Nevertheless the Labour Party, the Socialist Left Party and the Red Party defend this direction tooth and nail. For the left the taxation is a matter of pure ideology and an ingrained fear of “the rich”. Their stated goal is social equalisation and redistribution. They argue that the tax system is to prevent inequalities from increasing, and believe sincerely that the state is better suited to steer and distribute the capital than private owners.
Political capital is harvested by presenting private fortunes as something inherently suspicious, instead of seeing them as the motor of society.
What the left fundamentally misunderstands is the connection between value creation and welfare. They are driven by a fear of wealth, but do not realise that a society that does not allow individuals to become rich by developing society’s production is a society that condemns itself to stagnation. When one chases away private capital, one brakes innovation, technological development and new jobs. It does not create equality in prosperity; it creates greater poverty among those who are not rich and never will be, because the secure jobs and the tax revenues that finance the welfare state disappear.
The government and their support parties know perfectly well what the consequences are. Nevertheless they deliberately continue down a path that weakens Norway’s standing in the Western world as a stable, functioning and attractive society in which to invest and operate. For everyone who understands how the economy and business life function, this is a total “no-brainer”. It is a willed demolition of the motor in the Norwegian economy. It is tragic and completely incomprehensible that governing forces deliberately choose to brake the economic development for their own people and country – merely in order to satisfy an ideological blind-spot reflex against private fortunes.
