Norway’s investment choices have grown more controversial in the past nine months over the exclusion of Wal-Mart, the American retailer whose big-box stores do not exist in this pristine country. Public pension funds on both sides of the Atlantic commonly avoid investing in certain companies on social or ethical grounds. But it is extremely rare for a sovereign state to make such judgments, and rarer still for one to do it in the pointed, public way that Norway has.
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The American ambassador to Norway, Benson K. Whitney, accused the administrators of Norway’s Government Pension Fund of a sloppy screening process that unfairly excluded United States companies.
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