A Spirited Conversation: 7 April 2008. Keywords: Globalisation & Trade; Literature and Culture; Political Economy & History; When I began the study which led to my book, Globalisation and the Wealth of Nations, I assumed that ultimately globalisation would destroy nations. I knew that globalisation had created the modern nation-state, which hardly existed…
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Note prepared 6 April, 2008. Keywords: Distributional Economics; Statistics; The conventional Engel Curve relates expenditure on (usually) food (F) to aggregate household (usually) expenditure (X). Since it is a one-to-one relation it my be mathematically inverted to (1) X = f(F, z) where z is a vector of other variables which…
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Alan Bollard’s not a Grinch, he’s just doing his job. Listener: 5 April, 2008. Keywords: Macroeconomics & Money; Last October, Alan Bollard, Governor of the Reserve Bank, broke an implicit constitutional convention when he said that if this year’s tax cuts were too generous, he would have to tighten monetary policy. Governors have long muttered…
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Listener: 22 March, 2008. Keywords: Social Policy; Statistics; “Incentives matter” is a routine part of economists’ thinking. Tax a commodity, its price goes up and there is an incentive to reduce consumption. Reduce the tax, the price goes down and the incentive goes the other way. But many real-life circumstances are more complex, and the…
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A report finds our health system is too top-down. Listener: 8 March, 2008. Keywords: Governance; Health; “There does not seem to be the understanding that several actions – for example, writing a policy or reminding staff about a concern – are actually very weak actions. There is also little indication that general…
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Paper to MSD seminar of the Social Impacts of the Emissions Trading Scheme, Thursday 28 February, 2008. Keywords: Environment & Resources; Thankyou for the invitation to talk today. It is a pleasure to be working again with Computable General Equilibrium Models. In the early 1980s New Zealand was a world leader in CGE…
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Speech to the Tribal Economies Forum of the First Nations Futures Program, Christchurch: 23 February 2008 (Revised) Keywords: Governance; Maori; Tena kotou, katoa. Thankyou for the invitation to speak to you on tribal economies. It would not, however, be appropriate for me to tell this audience how to run their tribes. What…
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Cheers to George Laking: 1912-2008. Listener: 23 February, 2008. Keywords: Health; Regulation & Taxation; Sir George Laking rendered many services to New Zealanders. Perhaps none was as important as his chairing the 1989 government committee that recommended today’s liquor licensing regime. The consumption of liquor has always been a problem, less so in the distant…
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The days of having a dominant world currency are coming to an end. Listener: 9 February, 2008. Keywords: Globalisation & Trade; Macroeconomics & Money; When a barrel of oil rose to $US100, it also cost E69, $NZ130 and at least 200 million Zimbabwean dollars (at the unofficial exchange rate). There was some…
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This proposal to the Marsden Fund indicates the state of play in February 2008 Keywords: Political Economy & History; The last attempt to write a comprehensive New Zealand economic history was Condliffe’s New Zealand in the Making (1930) and The Welfare in New Zealand (1959). There are various studies which cover particular periods,…
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The Meaning of Globalisation Globalisation – the integration of regional and national economies – has been one of the great forces which have shaped the modern world. New Zealand would be a very different place had there been no globalisation and its forces continue to influence our world. To what extent we can shape our…
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Public ownership is not as important as public control. Listener: 26 January, 2008. Keywords: Business & Finance; Forty years ago Arnold Nordmeyer, then leader of the Labour Opposition, asked a group of students whether they wanted to nationalise corner dairies. His question has haunted me ever since. We don’t want publicly owned…
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Coconuts provide wood, mats, thatch, medicine … and a future. Listener: 19 January, 2008. Keywords: Globalisation & Trade; Last November, the Body Shop announced it was shipping 300kg of refined organic coconut oil from Samoa to Britain for use in a new product range to be launched in 2008. In some…
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Keywords: Literature and Culture; It is hard to talk of Shirley Smith’s final years, when that extraordinary mind left her long before her body did. Layer after layer of her adult life was stripped away leaving her child-like presence. She still received visitors, ever so politely, and with gratitude, in the way a child might….
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The producer is no longer king. Listener: 29 December, 2007. Keywords: Business & Finance; It’s been a long way from the Agricultural Development Council (ADC) of 1963 to last month’s Primary Industries Summit – in both time and head space. The ADC focused on the pastoral sector. In those days, dairy,…
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Current economic debate rarely extends beyond hearsay and uninformed opinion. Listener: 15 December, 2007. Keywords: History of Ideas, Methodology & Philosophy; Political Economy & History; Thirty years ago, a large majority of New Zealand economists argued for greater use of the market to regulate the economy. Prime Minister Rob Muldoon was sympathetic,…
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Chapter 3 of New Zealand, New Welfare, edited by N. Lunt, M. O’Brien & R. Stephens. (Cenage Learning, 2007) Keywords: Globalisation & Trade; Labour Studies; Social Policy; In March 1952, just two men were on the Department of Social Security’s unemployment benefit. The rules of entitlement partly determine the numbers, but those registered…
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Ignore the happy brigade. The forces of recession are already in motion. Listener: 1 December, 2007. Keywords: Macroeconomics & Money; Larry Summers, the best economist ever to have been Secretary of the US Treasury, points out that major international financial crises occur about every three or four years. The last – the…
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This note was prepared for some colleagues. Keywords: Distributional Economics; Growth & Innovation; Th phrase ‘hollowing out’ is often used to cover a multitude of poorly thought through ideas which have lots of rhetoric but perhaps not much intellectual content. Here I am going to try to give the notion some analytical rigour…
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Rising food prices look set to continue. Listener: 17 November, 2007. Keywords: Globalisation & Trade; The boom in dairy product prices is a consequence partly of overseas drought and partly of Americans using their maize to make biofuels, leaving less for their cows. The same condition is depressing the price of…
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