We need to distinguish the sovereign state from the people it governs, and the other political institutions between. Things are moving so fast in the financial negotiations between Greece and the Troika (European Central Bank, European Union, International Monetary Fund) that there is little point in my trying to comment on them. But there is…
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Recent publications suggest that the children who live at the bottom in economies with high inequality have reduced life chances. The grandfather of modern distributional research is Tony Atkinson, a British economist who began in the 1960s a lifetime career studying the British and world income distributions and other related ones. He has been described…
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The following response to three questions (in italics) was published in a prestigious Uruguayan weekly newspaper “Brecha“. It may be of interest because I am responding to the Latin American economic debate which is slightly different from the New Zealand one (but only slightly). Sorry for the included material necessary for an audience outside New…
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Those on the left of politics have a choice between defending their past achievements or taking up the challenges which face us. The Democratic Left is in disarray throughout the world. It is mainly out of power (but that has been true for most of its history); when it is in power it looks awfully…
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Should membership of Kiwisaver be compulsory? Research, some of it thirty years old, points in that direction. The current debate over the future of Kiwisaver is largely bereft of developments in economics over the last thirty or so years. Rather the frame has been an approach to human behaviour which we know does not reflect…
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The US senate has given trade promotion authority to the President. What next? Will the TPP agreement be acceptable, and to whom? Unfortunately trade negotiations are riddled with acronyms. I have listed the ones used here at the end of the article. The US Senate has finally passed the Trade Promotion Authority (TPA). This is…
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The 2015 Budget did not deal with children’s poverty but it did put a down payment. (This is based on a presentation to a Child Poverty Action Group Post-budget Breakfast.) The budget begins by identifying five ‘fiscal priorities’. Three are about the fiscal deficit and the track of the fiscal debt, one is about ACC…
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There is a lot of chatter about the government’s budget deficit but, politics aside, why does it matter? Rob Muldoon famously remarked that the typical New Zealander would not know a budget deficit if he or she tripped over it in the street. Knowing a little bit about it I have puzzled as to how…
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You may have been surprised at the outcome of the recent British elections, but New Zealand’s experience shows you should not have been surprised that you were surprised While writing my history of New Zealand, I wondered about whether it would be possible to assess people’s attitudes before there were surveys. Writers often impose their…
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Arts and cultural policy seems to be going backward at the moment. Why? Does it matter? In his 1852 inaugural speech as Canterbury’s first superintendent, James Fitzgerald – later to be New Zealand’s first premier – said, ‘There is something to my mind awful in the prospect of the great mass of the community rapidly…
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Why does the Minister of Finance say this is is hardest budget ever? The economy may be doing moderately well, but it is by no means performing outstandingly. In 1993 the New Zealand economy began to show signs of an upswing after the seven years of Rogernomics Stagnation. In a public comment I remarked that…
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Can an environmentalist focus solely on sustainability or are they drawn into wider issues such has how fairly the material product of the economy is distributed? Perhaps heightened by the leadership contest in the Green Party, there appears to be a debate going on about where environmentalism fits into the political spectrum. I am not…
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Sharp movements in exchange rates often reflect sophisticated speculation. Is there much we can do about it? While the near parity of the Australian and New Zealand dollars got a lot of breathless attention recently, there was little analysis of why it was happening. Explaining the exchange rate depends upon the time horizon. In the…
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How come we tolerated such appalling working conditions for so long? (And a tick for crusading journalism.) Charles Dickens would be appalled. So would Fredrick Engels who wrote The Condition of the Working Class in England, as would New Zealand’s Sweating Commission of 1890. Even Simon Legree, the slave owner in Harriet Beecher’s Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, would…
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Are we paying enough attention to bureaucracy? Are the current bureaucratic pressures changing the nature of society — and are they doing so for the public good? David Graeber may be best remembered for coining Occupy Wall Street’s ‘We are the 99 percent’. In the literary world the LSE-based anthropologist is well known for his Debt,…
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Perhaps New Zealand’s acceptance of the TPPA will depend upon the outcome of the Northland by-election Prime Minister John Key shortened his trip to Japan and Korea in order to spend more time campaigning in the Northland by-election. Domestic affairs trumped international ones – for a short time anyway. He said he was going north…
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The Northland by-election demonstrates we do not have a regional development policy. Should we? What might it look like? The government’s announcement that it would be upgrading ten one-way bridges in Northland was a response inspired by the forthcoming by-election. Whatever the politics, it well illustrated the feeble state of regional development policy in New…
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The Elimination of Child Poverty Requires a Universal Child Benefit. The Growing Up in New Zealand Study at the University of Auckland found that half of the 7000 families in their sample suffered measurable material hardship in their babies‘ first years of life. That so many of New Zealand’s children are in poverty eating poorer quality food…
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The increase of the share of those on top incomes has not been caused by market forces but is the result of their more favourable taxation regimes they have experienced since the early 1990s. Policy Quarterly has just published papers from a symposium on distributional inequality held last June. There are really interesting papers by Geoff…
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Probably most people who regularly read Pundit are in the cyberspace equivalent of the ‘beltway’ – the term for those who live in or work in inner Wellington and are intensely interested as to what is going on there, not just in parliament but in policy-making. (OK, OK, they are interested in the gossip too.)…
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