Guest Column for http://norightturn.blogspot.com/ 16 October, 2006. Keywords: Environment & Resources; There appears to be a tendency to pose carbon taxes as the only economic way to address carbon emissions. But tradeable emission permits (TEPs) are a serviceable alternative which have both strengths and weaknesses over carbon taxes. Their greatest strength may be…
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The Rugby World Cup presents a challenge to Auckland’s governance. Listener: 7 October, 2006. Keywords: Globalisation & Trade; Growth & Innovation; The Auckland economy has been performing badly over the past few decades, partly because of the policies of the 1980s and 1990s, partly because of the failure to build adequate infrastructure. But the region’s…
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Being brilliant does not mean you are right. Listener: 23 September, 2006. Keywords: Business & Finance; Like most senior executives, Enron’s Jeffrey Skilling could be charming, creative, inspiring and playful; he could also be moody, arrogant and intolerant. Described by some as “incandescently brilliant”, and “the smartest person I ever met”, he saw intelligence as…
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This is a simplified version of a paper to the Joint Conference between the Social Welfare Research Centre of the University of New South Wales and the New Zealand Planning Council, 10-11 November 1988, published in the Proceedings edited by Peter Saunders and Adam Jamrozik, as SWRC Report No 78, September 1989. This version was…
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Published in the last issues of The Jobs Letter 254, 9 September 2006 (http://www.jobsletter.org.nz) Keywords: Labour Studies; It seems a such long time since unemployment peaked in early 1992 in at 11.1 percent of the labour force, when over 181,000 New Zealanders were jobless and actively seeking work. Others had become so disheartened…
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Listener: 9 September, 2006. Keywords: Macroeconomics & Money; The external deficit (of the current account of New Zealand’s balance of payments) is currently around 10 percent of GDP. Once, a deficit of three percent of GDP was thought about right; we got edgy when it rose above five percent. Should we, then, be panicking now? …
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The Doha round is dead. But NZ’s bilateral trade deals are no substitute for global ones. Listener: 26 August, 2006. Keywords: Globalisation & Trade; The Doha round on trade liberalisation is suspended “indefinitely”. More colourfully, India’s Commerce Minister Kamal Nath said that the round, though not dead, “is between intensive care and the crematorium”. Trade…
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Listener: 12 August, 2006. Keywords: Social Policy; It may seem absurd to ask the Treasury to project the government’s fiscal position, that is, its tax and spending, out to 2050, but that is what Parliament requires of them in its 2004 Public Finance Act. Given rising longevity, some of the study’s authors may…
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This was submitted to http://norightturn.blogspot.com/, posted 3 August, 2006. Keywords: Distributional Economics; Social Policy; Statistics; The New Zealand Living Standards 2004 report depends entirely upon its “Economic Living Standards Index” (ELSI), first used in the previous (2000) report. At that time I expressed reservations about the index. Many have not been addressed. What I do…
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I was invited to write about a favourite poem by students from Auckland Girls Grammar. It was to be part of a collection “Dear to Me” to be published in July 2007 by Random House, the royalties going to Amnesty International (New Zealand). I wrote two essays – to give the students a choice. They…
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Listener: 29 July, 2006. Keywords: Macroeconomics & Money; The change of coinage over the next few weeks will pay for itself. Not only will the new coins be more convenient to use, but also they are cheaper to make. The savings will pay for the administrative costs of the change. Today’s currencies cost…
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In July 2006, I was approached by a team from the MSD involved in looking at past and future social issues to provide a context for social policy thinking. The following are revised notes from the 90 minute discussion. Contributors to the review are anonymous, but there was no objection to me publishing my thoughts….
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Keywords: Environment & Resources; Introduction This is a response to the IPS Bio-fuels seminar series of July-August 2006. It is is both a reflection of what I learned and an attempt to put it in an economic framework. It may be useful to begin with a little of my view of economics….
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Listener: 15 July, 2006. Keywords: Education; I thought the only really interesting manifesto policy in the 2005 election was National’s proposal to give parents more choice and schools more independence. National wants to relax rigid zoning restrictions, increase the number of places at integrated schools and restore the funding to independent schools to past levels…
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Listener: 1 July, 2006. Keywords: Business & Finance; It is not the first time that Telecom New Zealand has been “unbundled”. When it was a state-owned enterprise in the 1980s it was directed by its owner (the government) to provide the local-loop lines, which connect households and businesses to the telephone exchanges, separately from the…
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Listener: June 17-23 2006 Vol 204 No 3449 His different sort of economics is awash with insights. I am often asked why John Kenneth Galbraith, who died recently at the age of 97, was never awarded a Bank of Sweden prize in honour of Alfred Nobel. The short answer might be that although he was…
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Listener 3 June 2006.
Keywords: Environment & Resources; Political Economy & History;
The last time I talked with Rod Donald was shortly after the 2005 election, walking along Lambton Quay. Rod was very disappointed with the election outcome, for his Green Party lost voter share, and hence seats. He thought that the scurrilous anti-Green election pamphlet did a lot of damage. I said that anyone who thought it valid was too ignorant to vote Green, although it damaged the Greens when the new government was being formed.
Speech to the Auckland University of Technology Residential Course on Regional Development, Tatum Park, Levin, May 30. The author is an adjunct professor of the Institute for Public Policy at AUT.
Keywords: Globalisation & Trade; Growth & Innovation;
Tonight I am going to talk about what New Zealand’s Economic Transformation might look like, and some of the things which need to happen in order to accomplish it. However, I need to begin with two caveats.
New Zealand Future Medicines Policy Summit, 29-30 May, 2006, Wellington
Keywords: Health;
My task is to set out briefly the issues that this panel of economists has been asked to address: whether the New Zealand health system is spending enough on pharmaceuticals. I’ll divide the answer into two. Is New Zealand spending enough on health care? Is New Zealand spending enough on pharmaceuticals in the health budget?
Should we have tax cuts without cutting government spending?
Listener: 20 May 2006.
Keywords: Macroeconomics & Money;
This columnist made himself highly unpopular in the 1980s by arguing for fiscal conservatism; ie, restraining the size of the government deficit between its revenue (mainly taxation) and government spending. Even the Treasury abandoned fiscal conservatism, arguing in 1984 that “with a floating exchange rate there is less risk that poor monetary and fiscal policies will impoverish those industries exposed to world trade while generating spiralling external debt”.