The US is throwing away its world leadership; will China fill the gap? In the past, this column has pointed to a transition in the world order, as the American hegemony weakens. It was uncertain how the resulting multipolar world – with none of China, the European Union, India or the US able to dominate…
Continue reading this entry »
Aside from its Orwellian doublespeak, the proposed legislation to change how we count New Zealand, first requires an expert review? In early April, the world’s biggest census ever began; it is a $2b exercise covering 1.4b Indians. It is so complex it will take a year, as first they count the households, then the persons…
Continue reading this entry »
The 2026 World Happiness Report challenges us to think differently about economics and about New Zealand. The New Zealand media reported the latest World Happiness Report with the single headline that New Zealand ranked 11th. It deserved more attention for there is much to be learned from the report and the 14 earlier ones. The…
Continue reading this entry »
Chapter 2 of ‘In Open Seas’. Ignoring the fact that humans are social has been a failing of much economic policy thinking. It underpinned the neoliberal changes on the 1980s and 1990s which were based upon the assumption that an individual’s consumption or income was the focus of policy. But a person’s income (or consumption)…
Continue reading this entry »
We may regret we have not put enough effort into building resilience. I was wrong when I argued that the Muldoon Government should have hiked petrol tax to ration petrol when it ran short following the Second Oil Shock in 1979. The Iran revolution’s reduction of oil output amounted to about 4 percent of world…
Continue reading this entry »
The turmoil in the world economy from Trump’s attack on Iran will delay New Zealand’s economic recovery. Back in 1993 I was perhaps the first to announce that the economy seemed to be in recovery. The notion was seized upon; apparently, the long Rogernomics stagnation was over, and economic growth would soon be booming. That…
Continue reading this entry »
This note is to promote a public discussion. It is referred to in Irish arts policy shames NZ Newsroom 23, March 2026 The Irish take their arts seriously which may explain their four Nobel Prizes in literature: W.B. Yeats, Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett, Sean Heaney, with James Joyce a near miss*. But great trees don’t…
Continue reading this entry »
Andrew Sorkin’s new book, 1929: The Greatest Crash in Wall Street History sheds light on how financial markets work. Economists argue over how exactly the Great Depression of the early 1930s occurred. We are pretty much agreed on what happened in New Zealand – our ability to borrow internationally became very limited while the terms…
Continue reading this entry »
Keywords: Social Policy;
Chapter 7 of ‘In Open Seas’ In the last 200 years, world per capita incomes (measured by market output) have risen over ten times on average– more so in the most affluent countries. In the previous 200 years they are thought to have risen about 10 percent. Can the miracle growth of the last two…
Continue reading this entry »
This is a note shared among colleagues which was a response to a graph in The Economist. In an article ‘British Class Politics is Back – With a Green Twist’ it argued that younger cohorts were experiencing poor economic growth prospects. Specifically :’Recently published an analysis showing that lifetime levels of GDP growth have a…
Continue reading this entry »
Industrial policy is once more on the agenda of many governments. There is a long history of Industrial Policies (IP) aimed at promoting a particular sector of an economy. When Henry VIII abandoned Roman Catholicism, the practice of eating fish on Fridays lapsed. The change devastated the English fishing industry. Edward VI, Henry’s son, reinstated…
Continue reading this entry »
It is more than a four-letter word exercise. In 1986, the government commissioned a review of science policy chaired by ex-Governor General David Beattie. Among the agencies it interviewed was the Treasury, in the course of which Beattie asked whether it had a science plan. The Assistant Secretary of the Treasury spluttered; he was clearly…
Continue reading this entry »
Shane Jones is committed to state-led economic development. New Zealand First and ACT sit further apart on the economics spectrum than do Labour and National. On other parts of the policy spectrum the two are more aligned, but this column’s focus is primarily on economics and, particularly, the economics of NZF. I leave Christopher Luxon’s…
Continue reading this entry »
Land and Money: How Britain colonised Australasia in the long 19th century by John Lepper 2 vols, Kerr Publishing. This review was published in Newsroom on 19 February, 2026 Some decades ago, a colleague was presenting a paper on the peripheral labour force – today we call it the ‘precariat’ – to a room of…
Continue reading this entry »
How successful are Trump’s measures at making America great again? War is destructive. It destroys lives, it destroys loved ones and it destroys economies. The victors’ economies suffer because a conquest is not as valuable as the rhetoric portrays and any gains go to only a select few. Even countries which are not invaded suffer…
Continue reading this entry »
There are politicians who are more than a comms team. Prime Minister Geoffrey Palmer was not doing well in 1990, so he announced his government would halve unemployment. That would have been an impressive achievement – then the unemployment rate was about 5 percent – so much so, it gave the government a temporary boost…
Continue reading this entry »
New Zealand International Review January/February 2026 Volume 51 Number It is common to say that Arnold Nordmeyer is the greatest Labour prime-minister-who-never-was. His failure was a matter of timing. The misfortune for Grant Robertson, who challenges Nordmeyer for the title, was that he was gay. Three decades after homosexuality was decriminalised, a gay candidate for…
Continue reading this entry »
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney outlines an architecture For some decades the United States of America domination of the world has been falling. This is most obvious in economic terms. The US is no longer the world’s largest economy. It is easy to say that China is because of it has larger a population but…
Continue reading this entry »
Why we want the Reserve Bank to operate independently. Minister of Foreign Affairs Winston Peters was wrong to criticise Governor of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, Anna Breman, for cosigning a statement with 14 other heads of other central banks (plus two from the Bank of International Settlement). The statement expressed support for the…
Continue reading this entry »