Category Archives: Labour Studies

What Does Reform Mean?

This entry was posted in Labour Studies, Listener on 30th July 2005 by Brian Easton.

How to preserve the social market economy in a modern Europe.

Listener: 30 July, 2005.

Keywords: Labour Studies;

Reform is a weasel word, avoiding specifics because advocates are either not sure what it means or they don’t want others to know. So, when the German Government and the Goethe-Institut offered me the opportunity to study the German economy, I just had to look at the reality of its “reforms” debate. Some of the implemented ones – pressures on the unemployed to take up work – seem not too different from ours. But some proposals have the ideology underpinning our Employment Contracts Act (ECA).

Ticketing the Future

This entry was posted in Education, Labour Studies on 7th August 2004 by Brian Easton.

Presentation to the Annual Conference of the Industry Training Federation, 16 July, 2004, Wellington.

Keywords: Education; Labour Studies;

Economists are not very good at forecasting the future. I look at what I wrote twenty years ago, and realise just how much I got it wrong. Or you might consider that before you is one of the first New Zealand university students to use a mainframe computer, someone who encouraged his children to use ZX81s, who was probably one of the first economists in New Zealand to use a PC (a 186), and who still failed to forecast the ICT revolution.

Working with Technological Innovation

This entry was posted in Labour Studies on 3rd June 2003 by Brian Easton.

Chapter of TRANSFORMING NEW ZEALAND. This is a draft. Comments welcome.

Keywords: Labour Studies;

The endogenous account of technical change means that all workers are involved in the application of new technologies. It is not a matter of some white-coated workers turning up at the warehouse taking the blueprints and handing them over to business that put them smoothly into practice. In practice workers can be intimately involved with the technology transfer process.

Productivity and Employment (version 2): NZ’s Post-war Economic Performance

This entry was posted in Growth & Innovation, Labour Studies on 1st May 2003 by Brian Easton.

Keywords: Growth & Innovation; Labour Studies;

New OECD data bases enables the revision updating and extension of an earlier version of Productivity and Employment: New Zealand’s Post-War Economic Growth Performance. It still belongs to a series, Comparison with the OECD and Comparison with Australia.

An earlier version of this paper [1] used the Maddison data base which had some statistics of employment and hours worked, and allowed it to provide some estimates of productivity.[2] Recently the OECD published a more comprehensive. albeit shorter, data base.[3] This paper revises the earlier paper, incorporating the new data.

Working Smarter: Is Our Workforce Skilled Enough to Compete Globally?

This entry was posted in Education, Labour Studies, Listener on 14th December 2002 by Brian Easton.

Listener 14 December, 2002.

Keywords: Education: Labour Studies;

Instead of the five percent downtime the manufacturer specified, the expensive German machinery was malfunctioning at four times that rate. The increasingly frustrated management called in its workers, who explained they had never had any training on the use of the machine. The German manufacturer would have been astonished. Their view is that each worker was a skilled technician who had a positive role in managing the machinery, not someone to do the jobs that the machine designers had not yet automated. Training for a new technology would have been routine.

Globalisation and the Labour Market

This entry was posted in Globalisation & Trade, Labour Studies on 21st November 2002 by Brian Easton.

Paper for the 2002 Labour Employment and Work Conference. 21 November, 2002. (1)

Keywords: Globalisation & Trade; Labour Studies;

It is argued that globalisation was a far more potent force in the nineteenth century, than it has been in the late twentieth, for then labour was highly mobile as well as capital and goods – although it was really only European labour which was mobile. Moreover, aside from initiative, the labour which migrated probably had similar characteristics to those which stayed behind.(2)

Economic Reforms: Index

This entry was posted in Business & Finance, Distributional Economics, Globalisation & Trade, Governance, Growth & Innovation, History of Ideas, Methodology, Philosophy, Index, Labour Studies, Macroeconomics & Money, Political Economy & History, Regulation & Taxation, Social Policy on 16th November 2002 by Brian Easton.

History
Sequencing (December 1983)
Freeze and Thaw
(July 1984)
Ssh …It’s the Big ‘‘D’’ (August 1984)
Confidentially Yours (August 1984)
Devaluation!: Five Turbulent Days in 1984 and Then … (July 1985)

Economic Liberalisation: Where Do People Fit In?
(May 1987)

From Run to Float: the Making of the Rogernomics Exchange Rate Policy (September 1989)
Liberalization Sequencing: The New Zealand Case (December 1989)

Towards A Political Economy of New Zealand: the Tectonics of History (October 1994)
The Wild Bunch?: An Inquiry is Needed to Restore Treasury’s Integrity (August 1996)
The Great Diversification: Ch 9 of Globalization and a Welfare State (December 1997)
The State Steps In: Michael Bassett Makes A Case for Intervention. (August 1999)
Remaking New Zealand and Australian Economic Policy by Shaun Goldfinch (August 2001)
The Treasury and the Nationbuilding State (December 2001)

Evaluation
New Zealand’s Economic Performance This is an Index
Economic and Other Ideas Behind the New Zealand Reforms
(October 1994)
For Whom the Deal Tolls (Of Dogma and Dealers) (August 1996)
The Economic Impact of the Employment Contracts Act (October 1997)
Microeconomic Reform: The New Zealand Experience (February 1998)
Some Macroeconomics of the Employment Contracts Act (November 1998)
View From Abroad: What Do We Know about Economic Growth? (May 1999)
The Model Economist: Bryan Philpott (1921-2000) (August 2000)
Comparison with Australia: New Zealand’s Post-war Economic Growth Performance (August 2002)

The Debate
Waist Deep in the Big Muddy? (February 1991)
Friends in High Places: Rogernomic Policies Have Powerful Allies in Australia (April 1994)
Systemic Failure (December 1995)
Ignoring the Critics (February 1997)
A Permanent Revolution? (March 1997)
In the Dark: The State of Research Into the Economy is An Embarrassment (June 1997)
The New Zealand Experiment: A Model for World Structural Adjustment? (Review) (July 1997)
Out of Tune: Even the Officials Admit the Health Reforms Were Fatally Flawed. (December 1997)
Money for Jams: the Government Response to Roading Reforms is Commercialisation. (January 1998)
Reforms, Risks, and Rogernomics (March 1999)
The London Economist and the New Zealand Economy (December 2000)
Locked Out: of Free Press and Free Economics (May 2001)
A Surplus of Imitation (June 2001)
Government Spending and Growth Rates: A Methodological Debate (January-May 2002)
From Pavlova Paradise Revisited by Austin Mitchell (July 2002)
Manure and the Modern Economy: Has Economic Policy Hardly Changed? (September 2002)
From is This As Good As it Gets? (December 2002)
1999 and All That (January 2004)

Books
The Commercialisation of New Zealand (1997)
In Stormy Seas: the Post-war New Zealand Economy (Chapters 15-16) (1997)
The Whimpering of the State: Policy After MMP (1999)

Productivity and Employment: NZ’s Post-war Economic Growth Performance

This entry was posted in Growth & Innovation, Labour Studies on 18th August 2002 by Brian Easton.

Note: This paper has been replaced by a more recent version based on a more comprensive data base. Go here for the most recent version

Keywords: Growth & Innovation, Labour Studies

Introduction

It is not always wise to promise an empirically based paper before the research has been done. When preparing New Zealand’s Post-War Growth Performance: Comparison with the OECD[1], I observed that the Maddison data base on which the OECD data derived also had some statistics of employment and hours worked, which allowed it to provide some estimates of productivity.[2] New Zealand was not included, but since there was comparable data for New Zealand, I thought, it would be straight forward to include New Zealand in the data base. Hence the promise to produce this paper.

Does Professionalism Matter? in Health and Education It Still May

This entry was posted in Education, Governance, Health, Labour Studies on 20th April 2002 by Brian Easton.

Listener April 20, 2002.

Keywords Education; Governance; Health; Labour Studies

In Graham Scott’s Business Roundtable published Public Sector Management in New Zealand”, the ex-Secretary of the Treasury provides an account of the late 1980s public management reforms with which he was closely involved. The book includes a few pages on critics of the reforms, including a half-hearted account of my views in The Whimpering of the State (and these columns). Scott writes, ‘Easton makes the extraordinary claim that reformers ignored, or sought to undermine, the personal responsibility and professionalism of the core public sector.’ I am not sure I went that far, but I did report American expert Alan Schick’s concern that there appeared to be an unaddressed tension between the reform’s managerialism with its emphasis on accountability, and professionalism which emphasises responsibility. Curiously (I will not write ‘extraordinarily’), Scott’s book does not provide much evidence that professionalism is a central concern, for its few mentions are desultory. There is more concern about ‘professional capture’, the danger that professionals will administer the system in their interests rather than the wider public good. (The issue echoes the corporate management/shareholder tension I wrote about in my last column Guard Dogs That Fail to Bark.)

Reviews Of Two Books on Labour Skills and Social Progress

This entry was posted in Education, Labour Studies on 1st April 2002 by Brian Easton.

High Skills: Globalisation, Competitiveness, and Skill Formation by Phillip Brown, Andy Green & Hugh Lauder (Oxford University Press, 2001).
Capitalism and Social Progress: The Future of Society in the Global Economy by Phillip Brown & Hugh Lauder (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2001)
NZ Journal of Adult Education April 2002.

Keywords Education; Growth & Innovation; Labour Studies

‘Knowledge-driven economies are associated with polarization and inequality rather than convergence and equality’ is the sort of challenge that our ‘Knowledge Wave’ adherents, wrapped up in rhetoric rather than analysis, would want to ignore. High Skills goes on ‘How societies tackle the problem of social exclusion and positional competition fro education, training and jobs is therefore an important pressure point for all countries’. So the writers are not rejecting the potentiality of the knowledge based economy, and its benefits – higher living standards of more and new products and better quality jobs. Rather, both books consider how we need to organise society given the knowledge-driven economy which is a response to globalisation.

Mind Your I’s and Q’s

This entry was posted in Labour Studies, Political Economy & History on 16th February 2002 by Brian Easton.

Book Review of Capitalism and Social Progress: the Future of Society in A Global Economy, by Phillip Brown & Hugh Lauder (Palgrave, $67.95)
Listener 16 February, 2002.

Keywords Political Economy & History; Labour Studies

The book recalls ‘in the aftermath of the Second World War the state emerged with a new mandate to create greater economic security and opportunity, where all would see their slice of the cake increase even if some were getting more than others.’ It was a ‘“Golden era” of western capitalism … built on “walled” economies of massed-produced goods and services which offered a decent family wage to low-skilled workers. … Much of the prosperity in this period depended on a political settlement between the state, employers and workers.’

Nationbuilding and the Textured Society

This entry was posted in History of Ideas, Methodology, Philosophy, Labour Studies, Political Economy & History on 23rd November 2001 by Brian Easton.

The Bruce Jesson Memorial Lecture 2001.

This is a revised version of the paper presented on Tuesday 23 October.

Keywords: History of Ideas, Methodology & Philosophy; Labour Studies; Political Economy & History

I did not know Bruce Jesson as well as many of you in the audience, although I may have known him longer, for we went to the same high school. Bruce was in my younger brother’s class, so I only just knew him then. While I have a memory of him gawky in the dreary school gray, it may be this is re-created because we all looked awkward in the uniform, so it is easy to imagine with hindsight. We did not overlap at university, but I recall being stunned by the occasion in 1966 when Bruce and some friends burnt a Union Jack in front of the governor-general, asking why we were upset about damaging a foreign flag, We were already refusing to stand up in the cinema for ‘God Save the Queen’, but that protest lifted the level of analysis, challenging us to think more deeply about what being a New Zealander really meant. However, it was not really until the 1970s I began to link with Bruce, first by reading his wonderful journal, The Republican , and later visiting him in Auckland.

Sonja Davies: 1923–2005

This entry was posted in Labour Studies, Political Economy & History on 16th June 2000 by Brian Easton.

Chapter 12, The Nationbuilders. (This was published in 2000, and does not record that Sonja died in June 2005.)

Keywords: Labour Studies; Political Economy & History;

The choice of people to be included in this book is based on a list of over forty names. For reasons similar to those of The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, only dead nationbuilders were considered. There were a number of women in the list, but despite my trying – with a grim political correctness – none fitted into the story the book was telling. (For instance, Te Puea was building the Tainui nation.) It is, after all, but one story from all of those of the New Zealand nation. Those who saw early drafts often drew attention to the omission, but could not suggest a suitable candidate.

Some Macroeconomics Of the Employment Contracts Act

This entry was posted in Growth & Innovation, Labour Studies on 28th November 1998 by Brian Easton.

Paper to the Labour, Employment, and Work Conference 7, at Victoria University of Wellington, November 28-29 1996, published in Labour, Employment and Work in New Zealand 1996, pp.148-156.

Keywords: Growth & Innovation; Labour Studies;

Abstract

Earlier this year Wolfgang Kasper produced a book “Free to Work: The Liberalisation of New Zealand’s Labour Markets” (Centre for Independent Studies). By reviewing this book, this paper is able to shed some understanding of the effectiveness or otherwise of the Employment Contracts Act. On the basis of the emperical evidence it is very difficult to reach, in a systematic way, Kasper’s conclusions about the beneficial effects of the ECA. In particular, the poor productivity growth rules out the likelihood that the ECA was a major contributor to the macroeconomic expansion of the mid 1990s. The Act would, however, seem to have contributed to the poor real wage growth, and the failure of many workers to obrtain a share in the increase in propserity of the 1990s.

The Deindustrialization Of New Zealand

This entry was posted in Growth & Innovation, Labour Studies on 26th November 1998 by Brian Easton.

Labour Employment and Work in New Zealand: 1998 Proceedings of a conference, 26-27 November, 1998, pp.38-46.

Keywords: Growth & Innovation; Labour Studies;

Abstract

Deindustrialisation is the phenomenon of the secondary sector growing more slowly than the rest of the economy, whether measured by share of GDP or of employment. Almost all rich OECD countries have been expereincing it. However New Zealand has been deindustrialising faster than the OECD average (even if the energy based industrie developed in the 1980s are included). The paper describes rthe phenomenon and discusses why it happened.¹

Productivity Puzzles

This entry was posted in Growth & Innovation, Labour Studies on 12th September 1998 by Brian Easton.

Why is Output Per Worker Growing So Slowly?

Listener:12 September, 1998.

Keywords: Growth & Innovation; Labour Studies;

A scientist puzzles most when a prediction fails. The generally poor performance of the New Zealand economy since 1985 (inflation excepted), was expected given the overvalued exchange rate as a part of the disinflation strategy. However the poor productivity performance was a surprise. By a careful selection of period or industry, or relying on anecdotes, it is possible to claim the growth of output per worker has been high. But a comprehensive review shows that productivity growth appears to have slowed down since the reforms, despite the pro-reformers promises that it would accelerate. Even those who might have expected the reforms to fail must be perplexed.

The Impact Cost Of Increasing Statutory Holiday Entitlements

This entry was posted in Labour Studies on 1st August 1998 by Brian Easton.

Report for the New Zealand Engineering Union, August 1998

Productivity and Employment contains an estimate of average annual hours worked by OECD economies.

Keywords:

There is a proposal to introduce four week’s statutory leave. The current situation is that the Holidays Act makes provision for an annual leave entitlement of three weeks (15 days) paid leave per annum. In addition there is also statutory provision for 11 days, although because Anzac and Waitangi days do not “mondayize” the number of such days are 10.4 in an average year. This paper estimates the impact cost of increasing the statutory minimum to four weeks a year.

Chapter 18: Defining Meaningful Employment

This entry was posted in Labour Studies on 11th December 1997 by Brian Easton.

This might be thought of as the introductory part of a very early draft of a chapter for Globalisation and Welfare State. It was written (about the same time as the book) for another purpose, and repeats some of the material in earlier chapters.

Keywords: Labour Studies;

Unemployment as a Human Problem

It is very easy to focus on unemployment as a statistic, of say 6 percent of the labour force being unemployed, and ignore that for the unemployed the relevant statistic is that each is 100 percent unemployed. The statistics enables us to distance ourselves form the human condition. Saying that full employment is should be X percent, irrespective of what that rate is, ignores the human problem for those who are unemployed.

Chapter 8: Labour Market Segmentation

This entry was posted in Labour Studies on 10th December 1997 by Brian Easton.

A chapter of Globalisation and Welfare State

Keywords: Labour Studies;

While it is easy to think of the workers in a labour market as largely homogeneous, in practice they are not. Rather than treat them as all totally different they can be usefully collected into common groups, in a theory of segmented labour markets.(1) Here we use the theory in its simplest form of segmentation – the dual labour market.