The Norwegian government has announced the line up for the new expert council to advise it on managing the country’s NOK18.7trn (€1.6trn) sovereign wealth fund (SWF), saying the panel will tackle the question of active management by the index-near fund.
Karen Helene Ulltveit-Moe, professor of economics at the University of Oslo, has been appointed as chair of the new three-member council, which the government said a year ago it would establish.
Jens Stoltenberg, Norway’s finance minister, said: “One of the success factors in the management of the pension fund has been to build on thorough professional studies.”
“I am pleased that we have now put in place an expert council with professional weight that can assist the ministry on important questions about how the fund should be managed in the future,” he added.
The Finance Ministry said Ulltveit-Moe – a former executive board member of Norges Bank, Norway’s central bank which runs the Government Pension Fund Global (GPFG) – had insight into several fields relevant to the fund as well as public administration, and the fund’s importance for economic policy.
The other two members of the panel are Harald Magnus Andreassen, chief economist at Sparebank 1 Markets, and Magnus Dahlquist, professor of finance at the Stockholm School of Economics.
Andreassen was a member of both the Sverdrup committee, which produced a wide-ranging report in 2022 on the SWF in a time of crisis, and the Mork committee, which back in 2016 recommended raising the fund’s equities allocation to 70% from 60%.
Dahlquist, meanwhile, was a member of the Finance Ministry’s expert group that assessed NBIM’s active management in 2018.
The ministry said the new council’s task in 2025 would be to assess the basis for the investment strategy and propose a framework for systematic reviews of important policy choices that have been made.
In addition, it said the council would have a role related to the review of Norges Bank’s active management of the fund, which was planned to be carried out in 2025.
The ministry reviews Norges Bank’s active management every four years, with the last review having been presented in the 2022 white paper on the SWF, in which the ministry said it planned to continue with the framework of setting permitted tracking error for the index-near fund at 1.25 percentage points.
When the then finance minister Trygve Slagsvold Vedum announced in April 2024 that an independent expert panel would be created, he said one of its assignments would be assessing different aspects of unlisted equities – an asset class the government was refusing, despite Norges Bank’s arguments, to allow as part of the GPFG’s asset mix.
The idea of an external expert council for the GPFG was put forward by the Sverdrup committee in 2022.
Read the digital edition of IPE’s latest magazine
No comments yet