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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Free trade deals can be complicated; so is their analysis. We must celebrate the achievement of a Free Trade Agreement with India, but only the uninformed attribute its success solely to the current Prime Minister, Christopher Luxon, and to Todd McClay, the trade minister. The negotiations took a couple of decades involving many more politicians….
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New Zealand is a small, isolated nation and needs to design itself accordingly. We should avoid uncritically imitating larger nations. Among the news websites I read is a British daily which once a week interviews a local writer on the books they grew up reading and which influenced them. That’s fifty-odd a year; most interviews…
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This column is a response to the complaint that we have poor economic performance because we have summer holidays. It praises them. Summertime, and the living is easy. We used to take our kids to Coes Ford on the Selwyn River near Christchurch for mucking around in the water. Great memories. Apparently, you can’t nowadays….
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The government is still borrowing for consumption. I do not think anyone understands the politics of the spat between Ruth Richardson, who chairs the Taxpayers Union, and Nicola Willis – including those two. The underlying economic issue is analytically clearer. The technical term for it is ‘fiscal consolidation’. It is easiest to understand it by…
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Journal of New Zealand Studies; NS40 (2025): Critics of the restructuring of the New Zealand economy in the 1984 to 1993 period have suffered from there being no good defence of the changes that were made. There are memoirs by various actors and the odd academic article, but they do not address the two elephants…
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How we connect economically with the world is critical. The British Labour Government is struggling. Partly it is because they were badly prepared in opposition; the Conservative Government was making such a charlie of itself that Labour expected that it would do better and gave little thought as to how it might. But while it…
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The Minister of Finance says it is but, parochialism aside, are we doing anything to ensure it really is? One of the necessary skills of a politician is to hold on to at least two contradictory positions at once. * Consider how, following the report of 72,000 New Zealanders ‘permanently’ leaving the country in the…
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The tensions between different approaches to the economy are surfacing as the election nears. As we head towards next year’s election, the tensions between the coalition partners are becoming increasingly evident. There are always these tensions, even before MMP when there were but two significant parties, but they were hidden within the caucuses. For instance,…
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Pragmatic analysis says maybe we should, but we should also consider nationalisation. We should certainly consider better regulation. An earlier column argued that we should make the government’s net worth – the value of its assets less its liabilities – more prominent in fiscal policy. Net worth is also fundamental when we are discussing whether…
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Presentation to Macrogroup Seminar, Friday 21 November, 2025; there is a PowerPoint that goes with this presentation. Available on request. Social Investment Analysis is another example of project evaluation where economists use Cost-Benefit Analysis. By the 1960s New Zealand was using CBA in the evaluation of irrigation and transport projects when, for various reasons, market…
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The pressure to globalise is consolidating towards a global world in which the US is a marginal player. There is a trope (or should I say ‘wishful hope’) by some that globalisation is coming to an end. While it may no longer moving towards a comprehensive integration, there are sites where it continues to expand….
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We should follow the Golden Rule of Fiscal Management and not borrow for consumption in the medium run. Asymmetry is a crucial, but often ignored, feature of credit transactions. You would normally be surprised if a shopkeeper said they would sell you 1kg of apples but not 2kg, even if you offered to pay a…
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Presentation to Wellington Macrogroup Seminar on Debt policy. 7 November 2025; there is a PowerPoint that goes with this presentation. Available on request. This paper argues that we should focus fiscal policy on net worth more than we do. The current obsession with debt ignores the difference between borrowing for investment purposes and borrowing for…
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Queen Elizabeth II famously asked about the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, ‘Why did no one see it coming?’ In fact, many economists (including yours truly) had pointed out that the financial system probably would crash. But we failed to predict what would precipitate the collapse, how severe it would be and when it would happen….
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