The making of giants in a welfare state: the Norwegian experience in the 20th century.

The population of Norway has become one of the tallest in the world even overtaking Americans during the course of the second half of the 20th century-not in terms of income, but in terms of physical stature and other indicators of biological welfare, such as longevity. This is also the case in several other west-European welfare states. Both income and physical stature have converged across Norwegian counties since the 1930s. We formulate the hypothesis that the west-European and Scandinavian welfare states perform well in mitigating spatial inequality in well being, in the sense that they translate income quite effectively into the biological well being of the population as a whole.