Category Archives: Social Policy

Economics and Violence

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Chapter in Overcoming Violence in Aotearoa New Zealand (Phillip Garside Publishing Ltd, 2002) p. 37-43.

Keywords: Social Policy

Economics has such a pervasive role in public discussion, that it is useful to remember that on some matters it has little to offer, which is the spirit in which this offering is made.

It is true that sometimes economic considerations can lead to considerable violence. Just over half a century ago the powerful economies of Germany and Japan, finding their access to resources restricted, tried to extend their territories to encompass their resource bases. Their military ambitions were settled with defeat in the Second World War, but the resolution to their limited access to resources took longer. The answer was increasing international trade, for today both countries – and many others – obtain the resources they require by international exchange. It is a solution which may not be ideal, but it certainly less imperfect than conquest. In a similar spirit the European Union was founded to tie up the coal and steel industries of Germany and France to make warfare between then again impossible.

Rewarding Service: a History Of the Government Superannuation Fund.

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Review in the E-Journal Making History (http://www.mch.govt.nz/History/making-history/govt-super.html)

Keywords: Social Policy;

There is a line entry in the 2002 Budget’s Economic and Fiscal Update for ‘GSF pension expenses’ of $671 million, an amount sufficient to more than double the total vote on arts, culture and heritage, the community and voluntary sector, conservation, national archives, the national library, and sport and recreation. Rewarding Service is a history of how that entry came about.

The Historical Context Of the Woodhouse Commission

This entry was posted in Political Economy & History, Social Policy on by .

Revised version of paper for Looking Back at Accident Compensation: Finding Lessons for the Future. Victoria University of Wellington Law School: 2-3 August: 2002. [1]

Keywords Political Economy & History, Social Policy

Although it is rarely presented this way, policy making is a problem solving exercise. At the heart of the success of any solution is how well the problem is addressed.[2] This approach, analogous to Karl Popper’s approach to the development of science requires us to be ‘as clear as you can one can about the problem, and watch the way it changes’.[3] A task then, of an historian, is to identify the problem or problems which drove a solution.

Is This a Healthy Budget for New Zealanders?

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Presentation to a Post-budget Breakfast Seminar sponsored by the PHA (24 May)

Keywords: Distributional Economics; Social Policy

The Child Poverty Action Group is an Auckland based group committed to addressing the economic and associated difficulties that children and their families face. It is grateful for the invitation from the Public Health Association to speak to you. Susan St John, their economic adviser, who has a sterling record in this area, asked me to make a presentation on her behalf. I am going to briefly summarise some of Susan’s recent work, reported in a paper Financial Assistance for the Young: New Zealand’s incoherent welfare state. Then at the end of a short presentation on an enormous and very important topic, add a couple of comments of my own.

Beware the Median

This entry was posted in Distributional Economics, Social Policy, Statistics on by .

SPRC Newsletter No 82, November 2002, p.6-7.

Keywords: Distributional Economics; Social Policy

In their article Beware the Mean!, Peter Saunders and Tim Smeeding argue that median household is a superior reference point for establishing a poverty line than mean household income, concluding ‘Put bluntly, the use of a poverty line linked to mean poverty income produces excessively high poverty rates that tend to increase by more when poverty is rising but to fall by less when poverty is falling.’ The purpose of this note is to demonstrate that poverty lines based on a fixed proportion of the median income are subject to a fatal flaw, illustrating the consequences of the flaw with recent New Zealand experiences.

The Macroeconomics Of the Superannuation Fund

This entry was posted in Macroeconomics & Money, Social Policy on by .

This was a note I prepared: 24 February 2002.

Keywords: Macroeconomics & Money; Social Policy;

Unfortunately the debate on the superannuation fund established by the Labour-Alliance Government in 2001 has largely ignored its macroeconomic effects. This paper takes the orthodox position that a government has to manage its fiscal position, including its deficit or surplus. There is no necessary rule – such as that propounded by the US right – that sets an a priori level for the fiscal position – such as the government should be in exact balance.

Economic Directions: What Does the Government Think It’s Doing?

This entry was posted in Growth & Innovation, Listener, Macroeconomics & Money, Social Policy on by .

Listener 12 January, 2002.

Keywords Growth & Innovation; Macroeconomics & Money; Social Policy

A government needs a policy framework to coordinate its various decisions, and give it, its supporters and commentators a sense where it is going. The Labour-Alliance government has not announced one. If it did, what would it look like?

The Public Use Of ‘ethnicity’ Statistics

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This squib was published in Letters to the Editor, The Dominion, on the 26 May, 2001.  I discovered it recalled in a report, A Question of Ethnicity – One Word, Different People, Many Perceptions: the Perspectives of Groups Other Than Mäori, Pacific Peoples and New Zealand Europeans, a prepared for the Statistics New Zealand Review…
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Poor Children: the Government Has Not Attended to the Child Poverty Problem

This entry was posted in Distributional Economics, Social Policy on by .

Listener 3 February, 2001

KeywordsDistributional Economics; Social Policy

Possibly the best established finding of twenty-five years of research on poverty is that children are disproportionately among the poorest of the nation. Not just brown children or yellow children or white children. Not just one parented children or two parent children. Just children. Over 30 percent of all children under the age of 15 are in the bottom fifth of the population by income. That means that over half the poor are children and their parents, and their rate of poverty is almost double the rate for the childless.

Value Added

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The Shift To A More Socially Responsible Economic Policy Is Also Supported by Public Opnion – With Real Political Implications.

Listener Cover Story: 25 March 2000

Keywords: Political Economy & History; Social Policy

The success of Rogernomics depended on New Zealanders changing their beliefs. Reforming economic and political institutions would not have been enough. People also had to think about governing the economy in quite different ways. The rhetoric of the reformers was that New Zealand had been a “nanny state” that did everything for its people. New circumstances and a poor economic performance (So they claimed) required a greater reliance on private enterprise and a major reduction in the range of activities of the state. New Zealanders had to reject their dependence on nanny and take greater responsibility for themselves.

Six Pack: A Brief Review Of Treasury’s Briefing

This entry was posted in Growth & Innovation, Listener, Macroeconomics & Money, Social Policy on by .

Listener 12 Feb 2000

Keywords Growth & Innovation; Macroeconomics & Money; Social Policy

Once upon a time Treasury’s briefing to the incoming government was notorious for thick volumes which set down economic prescriptions for the government with an arrogance offset by errors. However its 1999 briefing, Towards Higher Standards for New Zealanders, is more modest. Early on it states that economists’ “understanding of what generates (economic) growth is far from complete.”

Development As Freedom: a Great Book by a Great Indian Economist

This entry was posted in Growth & Innovation, History of Ideas, Methodology, Philosophy, Listener, Social Policy on by .

Listener 20 November 2000

Keywords Growth & Innovation; History of Ideas, Methodology & Philosophy; Social Policy

Nineteenth century economists tended to focus on material output, assessing how well off someone was by the amount they could consume. That notion dominates today’s economics. Pushed, an economist might say it is better to have more material goods than less or, perhaps more humbly, that economics was only good at analyzing materialism, so all the other things which make up human happiness are assumed as given, or that they correlate with material consumption. To acknowledge so would, of course, downgrade the importance of economics, and of economists, which might be no bad thing.

What Has Happened in New Zealand to Income Distribution and Poverty Levels

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Social Policy for the 21st Century: Justice and Responsibility Proceedings of the 1999 National Social Policy Conference, 21-23 July, 1999. Social Policy Research Centre Reports and Proceedings, 1999.

Keywords: Distributional Economics; Social Policy;

Introduction

In a recent article, the London Economist describes the “bad point” of New Zealand’s economic reforms which began in the mid 1980s as “a big increase in inequality.”1 In fact the New Zealand economy has generally had a poor growth performance, higher unemployment, and a worrying current account deficit ever since the reforms (although price levels have been more stable). Table 1 is a comparison between the overall economic performance of the Australian, New Zealand and OECD economies since 1985. There is no doubt the New Zealand economy has done worse. 2 Why this has happened, and why the New Zealand economic performance has been inferior to the Australian one, belongs elsewhere. For this paper, The Economist’s observation emphasizes just how widespread is the view that New Zealand has a more unequal income distribution, as a result of the policy changes of the last one and a half decades. But The Economist comment gives no sense of the magnitude of the increased inequality, nor its causes, which are the focus of this paper.

The Whimpering Of the State: Policy After MMP

This entry was posted in Business & Finance, Distributional Economics, Education, Governance, Health, History of Ideas, Methodology, Philosophy, Literature and Culture, Macroeconomics & Money, Political Economy & History, Regulation & Taxation, Retirement & Savings, Social Policy on by .


Auckland University Press, 1999. 269pp.

The policy process has changed dramatically following the introduction of MMP. Fascinated by the theatre of politics, we too easily ignore the major changes in policy approaches and outcomes. Today, without an assured parliamentary majority the government has to consult over its policies rather than impose them. Along with the increasing recognition that the policies of the past have failed, the policy blitzkrieg has almost ceased and commercialisation is being shelved.

The Whimpering of the State looks at the first three MMP years with the same lively, broad -ranging and informed approach as Easton’s successful The Commercialisation of New Zealand, which described the winner-takes-all regime before 1996. Again there are case studies: health, education, science, the arts, taxation. retirement policy, and infrastructure. Policy possibilities are explored. Yet, as the title of the book suggests, any releif from the ending of Rogernomics is offset be a realistic pessimism arising from a shrewd analysis of the continuing deficiencies in New Zealand’s political and social structure. Although written for the general public, this book will also be read by politicians, policy analysts and students, and will shape policy thinking in the MMP era. Publisher’s Blurb

Globalization and a Welfare State

This entry was posted in Globalisation & Trade, Social Policy on by .

In D. Lamberton (ed) Managing the Global: Globalization, Employment and the Quality of LifeI.B. Tauris. (2002) Proceedings of a conference sponsored by the Toda Institute and the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, at the University of Sydney, 28-30 November, 1998. P.163-168.

Keywords: Globalisation & Trade; Social Policy;

Globalization challenges us with the question ‘what choice (or what control), if any, does a society open to the globalized world have over its social and cultural policy?’ A common view is that it will that international competitive pressures are so strong that it will drive every country down to the lowest common denominate of a pure market economy, with a minimum of government intervention.

In the Abstract: Will Most Of Us Have an Impoverished Retirement?

This entry was posted in Retirement & Savings, Social Policy on by .

Listener June 6, 1998.

Keywords: Social Policy;

I would like to recommend Cornell economics professor Richard Thaler’s The Winner’s Curse: Paradoxes and Anomalies of Economic Life, which describes thirteen general anomalies where the standard economic theory of individual behaviour is contradicted by the evidence. Together they present a serious challenge to the “economic rationalism” which is used to justify so much of recent economic policy. But as important as the book is, many general readers will find it difficult, for it requires a modicum of standard economic theory and/or mathematics to follow some of the intricacies of its arguments. If you can tackle this level of abstraction, do read the book. Or give it to that undergraduate economist nephew who is already obnoxiously telling you how to run your life.

You’re on Your Own: the Nanny State Becomes a Hard Taskmaster

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Listener 14 March, 1998.

Keywords: Social Policy;

It is just a year since the Department of Social Welfare’s “Beyond Dependency” conference, memorable for the anger it generated. Charging a very high fee (near $1400) was a clear signal that the Department was not interested in a public discussion, but only the financial elite. It backed down by offering a few free places to selected people, but the perception of exclusivity remained.

Appendix to Chapter 12: Provision for Retirement

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This is an appendix to a chapter of Globalisation and Welfare State The chapter is not written.

Keywords: Social Policy;

Since the 1970s there have been various proposals for state involvement in retirement provision. Each accepts there is a role for voluntary private provision (commonly called the third tier). The differences occur over the treatment of the first and second tiers.