The Doha round is dead. But NZ’s bilateral trade deals are no substitute for global ones. Listener: 26 August, 2006. Keywords: Globalisation & Trade; The Doha round on trade liberalisation is suspended “indefinitely”. More colourfully, India’s Commerce Minister Kamal Nath said that the round, though not dead, “is between intensive care and the crematorium”. Trade…
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Listener: 12 August, 2006. Keywords: Social Policy; It may seem absurd to ask the Treasury to project the government’s fiscal position, that is, its tax and spending, out to 2050, but that is what Parliament requires of them in its 2004 Public Finance Act. Given rising longevity, some of the study’s authors may…
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This was submitted to http://norightturn.blogspot.com/, posted 3 August, 2006. Keywords: Distributional Economics; Social Policy; Statistics; The New Zealand Living Standards 2004 report depends entirely upon its “Economic Living Standards Index” (ELSI), first used in the previous (2000) report. At that time I expressed reservations about the index. Many have not been addressed. What I do…
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I was invited to write about a favourite poem by students from Auckland Girls Grammar. It was to be part of a collection “Dear to Me” to be published in July 2007 by Random House, the royalties going to Amnesty International (New Zealand). I wrote two essays – to give the students a choice. They…
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