Although the Netherlands had a huge role as transit country (which it still has) before the discovery of the Slochteren gas field, without its discovery and the already present know-how to win it - wealth creation within the Netherlands would not have boosted as massively as it did. Or such is what I learned at school.

I'm surprised that Finland hasn't been mentioned so far. As far as I could determine, that was an internally driven change from mainly agriculture to high-tech knowledge industry. Don't know about levels of protectionism, though.

Still. To me it seems to boil down to two things: a country's capacity to make change happen - which is largely dependent on already present capital/wealth - or national resources without out-sourcing them completely to foreign corporations.