Monthly Archives: August 1999

With a Whimper: Put Public Service Back in the Public Service

This entry was posted in Governance, Listener on by .

Listener 28 August, 1999.

Keywords: Governance;

In the opening chapter of Das Kapital, Karl Marx wrote in 1864 how recent developments in economics had “discovered the content” of value theory. His excitement is palpable, for the labour theory of value seemed to underpin his concerns of human alienation in industrial society. Unfortunately the theory does not quite work. Marx struggled with the idea, never completing Volume 3 (the text being put together from Marx’s notes). We all have brilliant ideas, which seem to solve the problems of the universe yet, as time go by, we realise are flawed. Fortunately, like Marx, we are not usually in a position to implement our faulty theories. When we are, things can go desperately wrong.

Income Distribution and Equity

This entry was posted in Distributional Economics on by .

D. Milne & J. Savage (ed) Reporting Economics: A NZ Guide to Covering the Economy, (JTO, 1999) p.103-110.

Keywords: Distributional Economics;

The morning this section was drafted, I listened to a lead story dealing with a statistical study which showed income inequality had been increasing over the last 15 years. The work was familiar because the results had been first reported three years earlier. The presentation made the New Zealand cricket team look world class. The journalists confused wealth and income, gross income and net income, income levels and income shares, and percent change and percentage point change. Deductions were drawn that simply are not in the data. Given it was one of our top news teams, the inference to any journalist faced with a story about the income distribution is “dont”.

Economic Globalization and National Sovereignty

This entry was posted in Globalisation & Trade, Governance on by .

In R. Miller (ed)New Zealand Government and Politics OUP (2001) p.14-24. Written in August 1999.

Keywords: Globalisation & Trade; Governance;

In recent years there has been increasing concern that a phenomenon of economic globalization, in which the economic processes of production, finance, and exchange in each country are becoming more interdependent between countries, is undermining the sovereignty of the state. In the New Zealand of 1999 this was symbolised by APEC, one of the agencies which promotes this globalisation, albeit a minor one compared to the IMF, World Bank, and WTO (World Trading Organisation), but the government’s focusing on it as a part of its (failed) reelection strategy, because it was hosting the annual APEC conference in September 1999 in Auckland (and numerous preparatory ones before then) gave the organization an undeserved prominence. In particular there was widespread public discussion, much of it reflecting a concern, and some of it generating unrest because APEC (and more fundamentally globalisation) was seen to be against New Zealand’s interests, in contradiction to the government’s expressed belief that it was beneficial. Much of the debate, if it may be called that, from both sides was simplistic and rhetorical, missing the complexities and subtleties of the issue. Rather than provide a yea or nay, this chapter tries to set down the context, first by wading through the narrow economics, but later by opening up the topic to place the economics in the wider context of political economy.

The State Steps In: Michael Bassett Makes a Case for Intervention.

This entry was posted in Governance, Growth & Innovation, Listener, Political Economy & History on by .

Listener: 14 August, 1999.

Keywords: Governance; Growth & Innovation; Political Economy & History;

Michael Bassett’s book The State in New Zealand 1840-1984 is an assiduous, if somewhat erratic, compilation of state economic activity in New Zealand, the result of burrowing through masses of archives from government economic departments. The picture he presents, up to 1984 anyway, is that the government of New Zealand actively promoted industrial development. On more than one occasion private initiatives were failing, and the state stepped in to assist a now successful business.