The Minister of Health is one of the toughest jobs in Cabinet. In comparison, being Prime Minister or Minister of Finance is easy. Recovering from an emergency operation, unable to move with all the tubes stuck in me, stomach in turmoil, unable to sleep, I thought the Prime Minister had asked me to be Minster…
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If there is a major shock, New Zealand has not got a lot of fiscal room to move. In late 2008, there was the Global Financial Crisis. New Zealand’s orthodox response was a fiscal expansion with a deficit (OBEGAL) of $3.9b in the June 2009 year compared to a fiscal surplus of $5.6b in June…
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The proposal to reduce the number of public servants is not well worked out. Announcing the reduction of 8700 jobs for public servants during the runup to the 2026 election suggests the economy is in a fragile state. The Iran War is generating global stagnation and inflation; even worse – if oil and related products…
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The outlook is gloomy. The Treasury economic forecasts for May budgets are usually settled in April to feed into the fiscal forecasts and, critically, the borrowing program. They can be changed in the interim six weeks if anything happens. (Not too difficult with a fully balanced forecast; I was once involved in a morning rejig…
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We are facing difficult challenges from the likely rise in import prices. Many readers may find this week’s column difficult compared to the discussions they are familiar with. That is because it tries to get the analysis right rather than skipping over the difficult bits and leaving the reader with misunderstandings. So apologies for the…
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In too many areas we are avoiding thinking about or preparing for oncoming changes. About a decade ago I had a ‘Lambton Quay’ conversation with an environment policy advisor. For those who do not live in Wellington, LQ is the main shopping street which starts at Parliament buildings; it also has cafes and government offices….
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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)…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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