The following is a ‘pundit column’, which was never published because the 2017 election swept it aside. Our carbon emissions regime is costing us a fortune; why are we not doing something about it? Suppose an item of government spending blew out from virtually nothing a few years back to more than $400m a year…
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Equivocation and dissembling have been integral parts of political life. How should we judge them? Among the sinners the drunk porter in Macbeth welcomes into hell is the ‘equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against either scale’. Equivocation is a theme of the play; Shakespeare is thought to have been influenced by the…
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With most parties having announced their lists for the next election, we need to think about how the system works. As some day it may happen that an MP must be found They’re put upon the list – I’ve got a little list Of political offenders who are always safe and sound And who never…
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The lives of two outstanding economists who died recently illustrate just how diverse the profession is. I first came across William Baumol when, as a student, I valued greatly his two textbooks: Economic Dynamics and Economic Theory and Operations Analysis, both lucid, intellectually challenging and with a gentle humour. (Rather than the conventional tradeoff of…
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AUT Briefing Papers July 18, 2017 Historically housing prices in New Zealand have risen a little faster than consumer prices, but the increase has been sharper since 2001, except for the period when the Global Financial Crisis impacted. I have graphed data from the Reserve Bank of New Zealand to see what the relationship is…
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Effective markets are underpinned by the government. The interventions may be sophisticated and well-thought through or they may be clumsy and ineffective. The neoliberal rhetoric of ‘free markets’ leads to the latter. In a recent Metro article, Matthew Hooten wrote ‘globalisation combined with free markets has been the most successful economic and social system of…
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The growth of farm output may be slowing. Specialty cheeses show an alternative strategy of further post-farmgate processing. Land for farming ran out in the 1950s. Farm production intensified. We shifted from more dollars of farm output by using more land to getting more dollars per unit of land. Among the challenges we had was…
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By exploring the multiple worlds she grew up in in New Zealand, Helene Wong’s memoir ‘Being Chinese: A New Zealander’s Story’ tells us much about our worlds too. Economists have a predilection for the open economy because, I think, openness to trade tends to be associated with openness to ideas, to technologies, to people, to…
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Jenny Shipley says the middle class has captured the welfare state. But did she understand what the welfare state actually meant before she began attacking it? In her interview with Guy Espiner, Jenny Shipley regretted that the ‘middle class’ were still beneficiaries of the welfare state. Now the term ‘class’ is a summary of a…
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Answering that question proves to be challenging. This preliminary assessment suggests the economic benefits to incumbent New Zealanders may not be great. During the Vogel boom, say between 1871 and 1881, the population of New Zealand doubled, as did real GDP (as best as we can measure). That means per capita GDP was much the…
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If the Commercial Miracle of Newspapers is Over, What will Replace It? Newspapers have been a commercial miracle. For a very small outlay one got access to a surprisingly wide range of news, opinion and information. Part of the explanation was economies of scale, but the trick was that much of the industry’s revenue came…
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Much of the commentary on the budget was shallow. What is really going on is that the changes are small but they reflect a particular political perspective. The financial threat was hardly discussed Allow me to be irritated by the trivial discussion which surrounds the government’s annual budget. The budget is simply the government setting out…
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Following up my ‘AUT Policy Observatory’ report on ‘Housing Prices Relative to Consumer Prices: An Analysis’. Last week the Reserve Bank reported stress tests to assess the ability of borrowers to cope with higher mortgage interest rates. Assuming 7 percent p.a. – close to the average two-year mortgage rate over past decades – the RBNZ…
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This report was published by the AUT Policy Observatory. It’s abstract is This is an update of a note I wrote in April 2007. It uses a longer housing price series that starts in 1962 (instead of 1980) and finishes in 2016 (instead of 2007). It shows that while historically housing prices have risen a little faster than consumer prices, the…
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This paper on public debt strategy is published as an AUT Briefing paper. It is available here.
Or has Labour lost its clothes or forgotten how to put them on. Some Labour supporters are disturbed that the government seems to be stealing their policies. Probably National is shifting a bit to the centre, perhaps for electoral reasons (although the party is almost certainly more concerned with New Zealand First than Labour) and…
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AUT Briefing Papers May 24, 2016 As a general rule, New Zealanders want more public spending. Surveys (such as the 2014 Election Survey) show consistent support for increases in spending, particularly in the areas of health, education, housing, law enforcement, public transport and the environment (in that descending order) as well as favouring reduced income inequality….
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Managing the government’s fiscal deficit need not mean cutting social expenditure. An economic Austerian is someone who advocates cutting government spending, particularly social expenditures, in order to eliminate a government’s fiscal deficits. (The name is a portmanteau of ‘austerity’ and ‘Austrian’ from the neoliberal ‘Austrian School of Economics’.) While Austerian policies are currently most evidently…
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AUT Briefing Papers May 16, 2018 The neologism ‘Austerian’ is a portmanteau of ‘austerity’ and ‘Austrian’ (School of Economics). It became extensively used after the Global Financial Crisis. It describes the policies of those countries which had to restrain public and private spending because lenders were unwilling to provide the funds for their budget deficits….
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AUT Policy Observatory May 2017 About this report This report is part of an ongoing series on urgent contemporary policy issues in Aotearoa New Zealand. This series has an objective of bringing academic research to bear on the economic, social and environmental challenges facing us today. The Policy Observatory Auckland University of Technology Private Bag…
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