The lives of two outstanding economists who died recently illustrate just how diverse the profession is. I first came across William Baumol when, as a student, I valued greatly his two textbooks: Economic Dynamics and Economic Theory and Operations Analysis, both lucid, intellectually challenging and with a gentle humour. (Rather than the conventional tradeoff of…
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Effective markets are underpinned by the government. The interventions may be sophisticated and well-thought through or they may be clumsy and ineffective. The neoliberal rhetoric of ‘free markets’ leads to the latter. In a recent Metro article, Matthew Hooten wrote ‘globalisation combined with free markets has been the most successful economic and social system of…
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The growth of farm output may be slowing. Specialty cheeses show an alternative strategy of further post-farmgate processing. Land for farming ran out in the 1950s. Farm production intensified. We shifted from more dollars of farm output by using more land to getting more dollars per unit of land. Among the challenges we had was…
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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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Jenny Shipley says the middle class has captured the welfare state. But did she understand what the welfare state actually meant before she began attacking it? In her interview with Guy Espiner, Jenny Shipley regretted that the ‘middle class’ were still beneficiaries of the welfare state. Now the term ‘class’ is a summary of a…
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Answering that question proves to be challenging. This preliminary assessment suggests the economic benefits to incumbent New Zealanders may not be great. During the Vogel boom, say between 1871 and 1881, the population of New Zealand doubled, as did real GDP (as best as we can measure). That means per capita GDP was much the…
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If the Commercial Miracle of Newspapers is Over, What will Replace It? Newspapers have been a commercial miracle. For a very small outlay one got access to a surprisingly wide range of news, opinion and information. Part of the explanation was economies of scale, but the trick was that much of the industry’s revenue came…
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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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Following up my ‘AUT Policy Observatory’ report on ‘Housing Prices Relative to Consumer Prices: An Analysis’. Last week the Reserve Bank reported stress tests to assess the ability of borrowers to cope with higher mortgage interest rates. Assuming 7 percent p.a. – close to the average two-year mortgage rate over past decades – the RBNZ…
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Or has Labour lost its clothes or forgotten how to put them on. Some Labour supporters are disturbed that the government seems to be stealing their policies. Probably National is shifting a bit to the centre, perhaps for electoral reasons (although the party is almost certainly more concerned with New Zealand First than Labour) and…
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Managing the government’s fiscal deficit need not mean cutting social expenditure. An economic Austerian is someone who advocates cutting government spending, particularly social expenditures, in order to eliminate a government’s fiscal deficits. (The name is a portmanteau of ‘austerity’ and ‘Austrian’ from the neoliberal ‘Austrian School of Economics’.) While Austerian policies are currently most evidently…
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Do residential care workers deserve the big pay increase they are getting? The recent historic pay equity deal for aged and residential care workers raises a tricky clash between quite different accounts of how the economy should work. Many people think that workers should be paid at a rate that reflects their social worth; others…
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The report of the Productivity Commission on the Tertiary Education Sector “New Models of Tertiary Education” is complacent. The report observes that in the decade from 2001 to 2011, the ratio of non-academic and academic staff in the public tertiary educational system rose from about equal to six non-academics to five academics. In fact the number…
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If Jim Bolger now opposes Ruthanasia, why did he preside over its implementation? I quite understand Jim Bolger’s rejection of neo-liberalism. Bolger is an active Catholic (as is Bill English); neoliberal ideology is a long way from Catholic social teaching. Ironically, there was a Papal Encyclical, Centesimus Annus, in 1991 as Bolger presided over the neoliberal policies…
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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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Past policies of banging on about economic growth have failed. A new report argues we should strategise differently with more comprehensive goals. The response by some regional leaders to Julian Wood’s Growing Beyond Growth: Rethinking the Goals of Regional Development while not unexpected was so typical of much public policy discussion. They had not read (or understood)…
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Extracted from a paper delivered to Wellington South Rotary; 22 March 1. The US is No Longer The International Hegemon There have been only two global hegemons – states with political, economic and military predominance or control over all others.. One was Britain in the nineteenth century. It was replaced by the US from about…
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How do New Zealand’s university departments rank internationally? Once a year the QS World University Rankings on individual subject areas are published. This reports on the 2017 rankings for 46 subjects. Each of the subject rankings is compiled using four sources. The first two are QS’s global surveys of academics and employers, which are used to assess…
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A recent government report projects huge increases in employment but at least 72 percent of those jobs are to go to immigrants. I was a bit startled by a report recently released by the Ministry of Business Industry and Employment which forecast an extra 480,000 jobs over the next ten years. Those with a memory will recall…
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Regrettably, the government’s recent announcements on the public provision for retirement have added to the uncertainty the young face. The Government’s announced proposal to raise the age of eligibility for New Zealand Superannuation (NZS) is a real botch job. I’ll leave others to write about the political botch; here the focus is on the policy….
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