Third draft of Chapter 3 of Transforming New Zealand. Comments welcome. (Second Draft).

Keywords: Growth & Innovation;

Once upon a time – not so many years ago actually – economic growth was thought to be the result of increasing combinations of labour and capital. Because of ‘diminishing returns’ – that is that each additional dollop of labour and capital was less productive, it was generally assumed that at some time – perhaps in the time of today’s children – economic growth would come to an end and there would be economic stagnation. This was before the days about the worry of exhausting the available resources, and issue returned to briefly later. The stagnation was seen as solely due to diminishing returns in capital and labour.

Third draft of Chapter 2 of Transforming New Zealand. Comments welcome. (Second Draft).

Keywords: Growth & Innovation;

This chapter looks at the level of New Zealand’s production since the war. It uses GDP as an indicator of that level. In doing so it is mindful of the weaknesses of the GDP measure discussed in the previous chapter and its appendix. But GDP remains the best measure we have, and as the book argues later, it seems likely that were a different production objective to be adopted (so products are valued differently form the way they are in GDP) the overall result would not be too different from using GDP as an indicator.

Third draft of Chapter 1 of Transforming New Zealand. Comments welcome. (Second Draft).

Keywords: Growth & Innovation;

In recent years the focus of economic policy has been on increasing GDP, which is a measure of the material production of the economy. The shrillest cries were that New Zealand should accelerate its GDP growth rate to rejoin the top half of the OECD on a per capita basis. As one business journalist, more noted for her rhetoric than her insight asked ‘what could be simpler than that?’ And she was absolutely right for the simple minded who had little conception of what constituted GDP or of how it might be accelerated.

Prologue of Transforming New Zealand. Comments welcome.

Keywords: Growth & Innovation;

After this book had gone through its first draft, the Growth and Innovation Advisory Board, which provides a private sector policy perspective to the government’s economic strategy (and of which I am a member), released its ‘Growth Culture’ study which described the public’s attitudes to economic growth. The report is rich in detail but its main findings were the public was not enamoured with the notion of growth as a key policy objective, and was tired of being told that they had to make sacrifices to increase the economic growth rate.

Metro December 2002, p.84-93, by Gilbert Wong.

Keywords: Growth & Innovation;

An even greater challenge to the orthodoxy that the reforms were good for growth come’s from economist Brian Easton. The problem he identifies is the way the nature of the decline is perceived. While New Zealand is in 20th place 30 years after it was in sixth place, the OECD data does not show a slow and steady decline. Instead, says Easton, it shows stable growth marred by two massive drops that spike down like two steps on the graph of economic growth.

How New Zealand Grows: Some Propositions VERSION 3: Updated 9 December. Original 17 October. The following propositions largely reflect my research program on the New Zealand economy. It is summarised in my In Stormy Seas. Page numbers in square brackets refer to that book. There is additional material in the areas of globalisation, innovation, intra-industry…
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Listener 21 September 2002.

Keywords: Growth & Innovation;

People keep going on about our low relative performance in the OECD. How bad is it?
We are 20th of the 28 countries in the OECD measure of output per capita. About 86 percent of the OECD average.

This is the second of a series of papers. The first has a secondary title of ‘Comparison with the OECD’ and the third is Productivity and Employment

Keywords: Growth & Innovation

The most obvious country to compare New Zealand with is Australia. How did they do in the relative GDP per capita stakes? This report does not go through the details of data preparation, which are exactly the same as reported in the Comparison with OECD paper.(1) The Australian series is that reported in Maddison, adjusted to a March year basis. (2) The accompanying table and graph show the ratios of New Zealand GDP per capita to that of Australia, and for Australia to the OECD, and New Zealand to the OECD.