AUT Briefing Papers March 27, 2018 There is a slowly but steadily accumulating body of criticism of the dominant economic paradigm which constitutes today’s conventional wisdom. A recent Oxford Review of Economic Policy devoted an entire issue to critiquing ‘Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium’ (DSGE) models, a workhorse of econometric forecasting based on much of the current thinking….
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December’s Half Year Economic and Fiscal Update (HYEFU) was combined with the Government’s plans for its first 100 days. Each December, six months after the budget, the Treasury reports on the state of the economy and the government accounts. Since the August Pre-election Economic and Fiscal Update nothing much has happened in the macro-economy, so…
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So claims Niall Ferguson, professor of history at Harvard. (These are notes prepared for a Radio New Zealand ‘Nights’ Pundits conversation with Bryan Crump. Tuesday 12 December 2017.) Niall Ferguson is known for his provocative, contrarian views and a number of books, including The Ascent of Money. I am not in a position to judge…
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The retirement of the Governor of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand leads to a reflection on what has been really going on. During Graeme Wheeler’s five-year term as the Governor of the Reserve Bank (RBNZ), consumer prices rose 1.05 per cent annually. He had a Policy Target Agreement with the Minister of Finance ‘to…
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Is public spending stuck in the vicelike grip of the austerity of our quasi-Austerian economic policy? Are we at a turning point in our politics? I don’t mean whether we have a new government. That is a matter for the voters; the polls say that either they are very volatile or that the polls are…
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The just published PREFU, Treasury’s assessment of the economy, raises more important questions about our fiscal stance than what the election is talking about. Have we the right borrowing strategy? It was amusing how the Minister of Finance, Stephen Joyce, had to present the PREFU (Pre-election Economic and Fiscal Update) as both an optimistic account…
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The policy dimension of the election appears to be about the concerns with past restraints on government spending and the consequential social failures. But whatever the rhetoric, implementation of campaign promises is going to be much harder. Last Saturday, the Minister for Social Housing, Amy Adams, admitted her government had a poor record on social…
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The following is a ‘pundit column’, which was never published because the 2017 election swept it aside. Our carbon emissions regime is costing us a fortune; why are we not doing something about it? Suppose an item of government spending blew out from virtually nothing a few years back to more than $400m a year…
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AUT Briefing Papers July 18, 2017 Historically housing prices in New Zealand have risen a little faster than consumer prices, but the increase has been sharper since 2001, except for the period when the Global Financial Crisis impacted. I have graphed data from the Reserve Bank of New Zealand to see what the relationship is…
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By exploring the multiple worlds she grew up in in New Zealand, Helene Wong’s memoir ‘Being Chinese: A New Zealander’s Story’ tells us much about our worlds too. Economists have a predilection for the open economy because, I think, openness to trade tends to be associated with openness to ideas, to technologies, to people, to…
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Much of the commentary on the budget was shallow. What is really going on is that the changes are small but they reflect a particular political perspective. The financial threat was hardly discussed Allow me to be irritated by the trivial discussion which surrounds the government’s annual budget. The budget is simply the government setting out…
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This paper on public debt strategy is published as an AUT Briefing paper. It is available here.
AUT Briefing Papers May 24, 2016 As a general rule, New Zealanders want more public spending. Surveys (such as the 2014 Election Survey) show consistent support for increases in spending, particularly in the areas of health, education, housing, law enforcement, public transport and the environment (in that descending order) as well as favouring reduced income inequality….
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AUT Policy Observatory May 2017 About this report This report is part of an ongoing series on urgent contemporary policy issues in Aotearoa New Zealand. This series has an objective of bringing academic research to bear on the economic, social and environmental challenges facing us today. The Policy Observatory Auckland University of Technology Private Bag…
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Are Labour’s proposals for the changing the way the Reserve Bank operates sensible or nutty (as nutty as the current legislation)? Section 8 of the 1964 Reserve Bank of New Zealand Act stated that ‘monetary policy of the Government … shall be directed to the maintenance and promotion of economic and social welfare in New…
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Is the fiscal pact between Labour and the Greens a defeat for the left? The parliamentary left seems cowed by the neoliberals if the fiscal pact between Labour and the Greens is anything to go by. This column focuses on their fourth promise which observes that ‘Core Crown spending has been around 30% of GDP…
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The times are a’changing, as recent macroeconomic fashions are being abandoned and old verities are being restated. Alan Blinder, an American economist, described as ‘one of the great economic minds of his generation,’ was an economic adviser to President Clinton and was a Vice Chair of the American Federal Reserve (central bank). He is known…
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Pretending it can, or that the Reserve Bank of New Zealand can function independently from the rest of the world, could generate a financial crash. The very joining of monetary policy and fiscal policy into a single phrase is a criticism of the neoliberal macroeconomics. The reconfiguration under Rogernomics assumed that the two could be…
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Paper to the Fabian Society, 12 October, 2016 While we continue to chew over the carcass of the Fourth Labour Government – the Lange-Douglas one – we pay little attention to the subsequent Fifth Labour Government. Yet the Clark-Cullen one is greatly shaping the current Labour Opposition and the current National Government. It will,…
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What are the possibilities for the future housing prices? What can we do? Two eminent but retired Reserve Bankers, Don Brash and Arthur Grimes, have argued that house prices should halve. I am not sure whether they actually mean it or are just vividly pointing out that house prices are about double the sustainable level….
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