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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What does the latest Economics Prize in honour of Alfred Nobel tell us about economics as a science? Alfred Nobel did not endow a prize in economics. In 1968 the Swedish National (i.e. central) Bank founded a ‘Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel’. The award’s announcement is coordinated with the annual Nobel…
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No, but we need to address poverty. Focusing on poverty targets which are not to be achieved in the time of the government which sets them is wasting energy and opportunity. Despite being frequently ignored, Gilling’s Law is one of the most powerful social laws I know. Formulated by Don Gilling, a retired professor of…
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A report explains why: small but accumulating biases together on top of adverse early-life social and environmental conditions. To be frank, this column on criminology is not in an area of my expertise. But in the course of my reading to place economics in a social context – I do that a lot – I…
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We don’t need to refresh trade policy; we need to rethink how best to engage with the world in the context of increasing globalisation. The Government is ‘refreshing’ its international trade strategy. Refresh is a euphemism. It ought to overhaul it. Here are some guidelines; I begin with the overarching framework. The context is globalisation…
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Last week’s report on wellbeing and the household income distribution told us some new things. Are we listening? Sadly, the latest MSD report The Material Wellbeing of NZ Households, by Bryan Perry, released last week, passed by quickly. It said, broadly, that there is no obviously significant shift in the level of inequality in recent years….
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Is it possible to have sensible discussions in public? Last June there was a kerfuffle in the online magazine Spinoff over attitudes to intellectual activity in New Zealand. It was precipitated by an extract from Auckland retired academic Roger Horrocks’s recently published collection of essays, Re-inventing New Zealand.. The excerpt came from ‘A Short History of “The New Zealand Intellectual”’…
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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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As the proposed Ministry of Vulnerable Children shows, we do not take prevention seriously. In 1920, someone wrote in the Maoriland Worker, ‘The politician is like the person who would build an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff, instead of constructing a good fence at the top.’ The image seems to have been coined in a…
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A Professor of Education challenges universities about their purpose. What are universities really for? was the topic of a recent lecture by Hugh Lauder, professor of Education and Political Economy at the University of Bath (previously on the Canterbury and VUW faculties). His answer may not be what you think; this is an economist’s response. New Zealand…
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Free movement of labour is often described as one of the four fundamental economic freedoms. Putting it into practice is somewhat more difficult. To make the intentions of this column clear, I am generally in favour of migration. I am a descendant of immigrants and live in a country in which virtually everyone admits to…
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Our nearest neighbour, New Caledonia, has a very different political economy. Will it vote for full independence from France in 2018 – also leaving the European Union? New Zealand shares a continent with the European Union. Admittedly 93 percent of Zealandia is submerged beneath the Pacific Ocean but at its most north-western are the islands…
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In too many areas the government is avoiding taking policy decisions. When it has to its panic measures are knee-jerk and quick-fix. Just nine years ago, John Key, then leader of the opposition, spoke to the Auckland branch of the New Zealand Contractors Federation about housing affordability which he described then as a ‘crisis reached…
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The Reserve Bank cannot deliver affordable housing by itself. Its actions have to be coordinated with the government’s. Unfortunately the monetarist framework of the Reserve Bank Act obscures this. The tensions between the Reserve Bank and the Government over housing policy go back to the mistaken economic thinking in the 1989 Reserve Bank Act. Monetarism…
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Too much of pop-economics is misleading to the point close to being lying. No wonder there is a widespread rejection of it by the populace. Journalists and other populisers get away with an economics which does not quite lie, but is often very misleading. This applies to Brexit, but let’s start off with the TPPA…
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The economics of information shows that whatever happens, the solution our ailing newspapers to the digital revolution will not be a perfect one. An important notion in economic analysis is of a ‘public good’ (which may be a service). Not THE public good (a.k.a. the ‘common good’), which is shared and beneficial for all or…
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Nineteenth-century migrants may have come here to escape oppressive laws, but the laws migrated too. It was late in the twentieth century that we abolished one of the most oppressive ones. Our origins are less humane than we like to pretend. Wilkens Micawber was incarcerated in a debtors’ prison. It is said that he is…
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It is unclear why anyone is voting for Britain leaving the EU nor, in many cases, why they are voting for remain. What are the possible alternatives? How is Britain or New Zealand to function in an increasingly globalised world. As I put up this column, the Brits are about to vote on Brexit –…
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A major preoccupation of the budget was preparing for the next major financial crisis. To do so it is reducing government spending relative to GDP. Where do tax cuts fit in? Our politics reminds me those weekly serial movies where each week the heroine ends in an impossible situation but next week she miraculously escapes…
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The government has let the housing market deteriorate with measures which are insufficient, late and ineffective. As a first step we need to identify the underlying problems. The Prime Minister’s announcement that there is nothing new about homelessness is both an example of his strengths in reassuring the public that there is never really a…
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