One Could Reduce Child Poverty At No Fiscal Cost Following the Richardson/Shipley 1990 ‘redesign of the welfare state’ – which eliminated the universal Family Benefit and doubled the rate of child poverty – various income supplements for families have been added, the best known being ‘Working for Families’, introduced in 2005. The result of the…
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There is a constant theme from the economic commentariat that New Zealand needs to lift its economic growth rate, coupled with policies which they are certain will attain that objective. Their prescriptions are usually characterised by two features. First, they tend to be in their advocate’s self-interest. Second, they are unbacked by any systematic empirical…
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Do we treat the government finances with the common sense that household’s manage theirs? It is a commonly held view that we should treat the government as if it is a prudent household. We don’t when it comes to its debt. Currently the government says it wants to constrain its net debt to between 20…
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Budget tensions are becoming evident within the Coalition Government. Winston Peters made numerous political points in his speech to the NZF annual conference. But the attack on his own government’s fiscal policies raised issues of substance. ‘Today in the Sunday Star Times, journalist and former advisor to the Labour Government, Vernon Small, refers to the…
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Is she hinting that the Coalition Government will have to back down on key promises it made in Opposition? The Minister of Finance, Nicola Willis, is telling an evolving story about her fiscal challenges. In Opposition she was confident that she could deliver her promised income tax cuts. Appointed minister, she reported the (Treasury) ‘books’…
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What seemed a booming success a couple of years ago has collapsed into fraud convictions. I looked at the crash of FTX (short for ‘Futures Exchange’) in November 2022 to see whether it would impact on the financial system as a whole. Fortunately there was barely a ripple, probably because it was too small and…
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The Government says it will give localities more control over healthcare decisions. But how? New Zealand’s political reflex is that any problem can be resolved by further centralisation. Students will be officially banned from having cell phones at school from Term 2. The decision could have been left to individual schools. Each knows a lot…
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Not so much from a lack of nominal income but from rising mortgage interest rates The just released Statistics New Zealand (SNZ) estimates child poverty for the year ending June 2023 show the proportions of children on nine different poverty measures are higher than they were in the June 2022 ending year. SNZ warns that…
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The Sorry Story of Earthquake-Prone Buildings. The Treasury requires that when new or amended legislation is proposed, a Regulatory Impact Statement (RIS) be provided – ‘a high-level summary of the problem being addressed, the options and their associated costs and benefits, the consultation undertaken, and the proposed arrangements for implementation and review’. In its hurry…
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Public policy towards tobacco consumption remains politically sensitive. In 1983, a young researcher was told by a medium-level Treasury official that Treasury policy was to abandon excise duties on tobacco. The senior Treasury economist that I consulted, famed for his commonsense, snorted ‘we need the money’. He explained that no-excise-duty was the ambition of a…
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Interpreting the agreement made at Waitangi as a social contract is a way to move forward on treaty issues. (This column follows ‘Our Understandings Of Te Tiriti Has Evolved Organically’.) Te Tiriti is in the form of a social contract of the sort that political theorists have discussed since the seventeenth century to explain how…
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Why try to stop that evolution? In 1956, historian Ruth Ross presented her investigations of the treaty signed at Waitangi on 6 February 1840 to a seminar concluding, ‘The [Māori and Pakeha] signatories of 1840 were uncertain and divided in their understanding of [Te Tiriti’s] meaning; who can say now what its intentions were? ……
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And even more from the book it is based upon: “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer” by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. Christopher Nolan’s award winning film Oppenheimer is based on the 2005 biography American Prometheus. I really liked the title. Prometheus was the Greek god who gave mankind fire, and was punished for…
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Luxon has to address the need to maintain and enhance New Zealand’s social cohesion. Dear Christopher Luxon, The greatest challenge you face is that of the nation’s social cohesion (rather than the economy). The problem has been with us ever since Hobson arrived. New Zealand is a diverse society. For over a century we suppressed…
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The New Zealand economy is struggling; the new government will struggle to implement its economic promises. There is not a great deal of difference in Treasury’s projected GDP growth patterns between the May 2023 Budget Economic and Fiscal Update (BEFU) and the December 2023 Half Yearly Economic and Fiscal Update (HYEFU). But there are some…
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Robert Solow transformed the way we think about economic growth. When you are in the trenches, you may not always realise what the war is about. Years later you read an account and see more clearly. Thus it was with me in the 1960s when economic analysis went through a revolution. My insight came later…
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The new Minister of Finance implied that Treasury’s ‘books’ were deceptive. Can’t see it myself. I was disturbed by media reports that the new Minister of Finance, Nicola Willis, had criticised the previous Labour Government ‘for leaving the books with “nasty financial surprises” that National will have to clean up’ and that ‘after looking at…
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In his Economists in the Cold War, Alan Bollard contrasts Saburo Okita of Japan with Zhou En Lai of China to highlight a critical issue. Saburo Okita (1914-1993) was in Manchuria (northeast China), in the port city of Darien (Chinese: Dalien) which was occupied by Japan at that time. Because they were politically unsympathetic to…
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Alan Bollard, formerly Treasury Secretary, Reserve Bank Governor and Chairman of APEC, has written an insightful book exploring command vs demand approaches to the economy. The Cold War included a conflict about ideas; many were economic. Alan Bollard’s latest book Economists in the Cold War focuses on the contribution of seven economists with each one…
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A comparison of the coalition party agreements shows commonalities but also some serious divergencies. They are mainly about returning to 2017 when National lost power. The two coalition agreements – one National and ACT, the other National and New Zealand First – are more than policy documents. They also describe the processes of the new…
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