Based on TV program to be shown on TV1: 5, 12, 19 August 2002. Excerpts from book, in which Brian Easton responds to Mitchell interviews. p. 156, 157-8, 160, 163, 164, 165, 167-8.

Keywords: Political Economy & History

Published in Applied Health Economics and Health Policy. Final version of the article.

Keywords: Governance; Health; Political Economy and History

Abstract: The New Zealand health sector reforms of the 1990s have to be seen in the context of the long term development of the New Zealand health system. The evolutionary change between 1938 and 1990 was abruptly replaced by the revolutionary policy of commercialisation from 1991 to 1993. …

Presentation to Commerce Nelson’s ‘Innovation Forum 2002′, 26 June.

Keywords: Growth & Innovation

It is indicative of the mood of the country that I have been attending more regional economic seminars in the last year or so, than I did in all of the 1990s. It probably represents both the government encouraging regions to develop themselves, and a sign of growing confidence in the overall economic direction. …

Listener 15 June 2002.

Keywords: Macroeconomics & Money

In the 14 years when Don Brash was Governor of the Reserve Bank (RBNZ), consumer prices rose a total of 40 percent or about 2.5 percent a year. However the early part of his term was a period of disinflation. …

Versions of this paper were presented to seminars of the Ministries of Economic Development and Foreign Affairs and Trade in May and June 2002.(1)

Keywords

The original invitation for this paper involved my setting out my work on globalisation, for which I had applied for a Marsden research grant. Alas, the applications which went into the second round do not include my one. Perhaps there are 137 more significant issues than globalisation facing New Zealand – which is scary. Even so globalisation is important to New Zealand’s future, to its very survival. This paper argues that not only is the issue important, but that research can progress our understanding of it. Such research should not be focussed on policy issues, but attempt to develop an intellectual framework, which policy makers will find useful. By eschewing policy conclusions it can go deeper, more analytic, and ultimately be of greater value.

Listener May 18 2002

Keywords: Political Economy & History

The breakup with the Alliance was probably inevitable, although had the government not committed troops to Afghanistan it may have happened after the election. While there were particular and personal elements in the party breakup, it also must be seen in the context of the conventional political spectrum. Labour, under Helen Clark, has command of the political centre of New Zealand, the party shifting from its centre-left traditions. No centre-left party could have readily engaged with Afghanistan (not after Vietnam) while its economic advisers include many rogernomes. The impression is its economic policy framework is essentially a continuation of the late 1980s, with a few minor modifications: a kinder gentler rogernomics?

New Zealand Herald 07.05.2002

Keywords: Globalisation & Trade; Macroeconomics & Money

Should New Zealand form a currency union with Australia, just as until recently Argentina did with the United States dollar? A fixed exchange rate between two markets is clearly advantageous to the exporter, whose one ambition is to sell to Australia. But more than 80 per cent of exporters and 90 per cent of the economy have other ambitions.

The Bill of Rights and the National Library and Archives
Listener 4 May, 2002.

Keywords Governance, Political Economy & History

While I have considerable sympathy for historian Jamie Belich’s plea to teach more New Zealand history in our schools, the Seventh Form course on the Tudors and Stuart periods is attractive, given its foundational role in the development of Westminster style governance. Or I thought it was attractive, until I learned that the study ends in 1660. …

Letter to “N.Z. Political Review”, Autumn 2002.

Keywords: Political Economy & History

While there is some dispute as to what a reviewer owes an author there is no doubt that he or she has obligations to the review’s readers, obligations which Simon Boyce manifestly fails to meet in his so called ‘review’ of my The Nationbuilders (Nov/Dec 2001).

Revised paper presented to the Rotorua Branch of the Royal Society of New Zealand, 1 May 2002

Keywords Growth & Innovation; Political Economy & History

The Nationbuilders is a book about the economic social and cultural development of New Zealand from 1932 to 1984 when a group of visionary New Zealanders developed the nation. The story is told through a set of biographical essays, but while some have read the chapters separately for the individual stories, in fact the book has a series of themes, which the lives illustrate.

Part of submission for the degree of Doctor of Science from the University of Canterbury. (April 2002)

Keywords: History of Ideas, Methodology & Philosophy;

I began studying economics at the University of Canterbury in 1962, while doing my honours science degree in mathematics, and in late 1963 took up the position of Research Assistant at the N.Z. Institute of Economic Research, completing my B.A. in economics at the Victoria University of Wellington. As a result I got a very wide training in economics – in macroeconomics, microeconomics, development economics, and public policy – covering both theory and applied economics.

Management and Shareholders
Listener 6 April, 2002.

Keywords: Business & Finance; Governance

In 1932 Adolph Berle and Gardiner Means showed that there was an increasing separation between the shareholders who legally own the corporations and the managers who control it. Their seminal insight suggests that managers may have sufficient independence to pursue their own objectives – higher pay, better conditions, prestige, technological excellence – at the expense of shareholders. (The New Industrial State by J.K. Galbraith is the best know book setting out the case.) Those committed to the pure market approach responded that the shareholder can sell the shares of under-performing companies to others whose managers would produce higher shareholder returns. They described the sharemarket as the ‘market for management’, where competition would result in higher returns to shareholders, as efficient managers took over inefficient businesses.

Overheads for a presentation to an Independent Practitioners’ Association Seminar, April 2002.

Keywords: Distributional Economics; Health;

*******

This work comes from a report on research being prepared by Brian Easton and Suzie Ballantyne.

This research arises from a limited grant from the Health Research Council.

It uses Statistics New Zealand data. However they only provided the data, and the results presented in this study are the work of the author, not Statistics New Zealand.

The data is based on unit records from the Household Economic Survey for the three years between 1994/5 to 1996/7. Access to the data used in this study was provided by Statistics New Zealand in a secure environment designed to give effect to the confidentiality provisions of the Statistics Act 1975.

High Skills: Globalisation, Competitiveness, and Skill Formation by Phillip Brown, Andy Green & Hugh Lauder (Oxford University Press, 2001).
Capitalism and Social Progress: The Future of Society in the Global Economy by Phillip Brown & Hugh Lauder (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2001)
NZ Journal of Adult Education April 2002.

Keywords Education; Growth & Innovation; Labour Studies

‘Knowledge-driven economies are associated with polarization and inequality rather than convergence and equality’ is the sort of challenge that our ‘Knowledge Wave’ adherents, wrapped up in rhetoric rather than analysis, would want to ignore. High Skills goes on ‘How societies tackle the problem of social exclusion and positional competition fro education, training and jobs is therefore an important pressure point for all countries’. So the writers are not rejecting the potentiality of the knowledge based economy, and its benefits – higher living standards of more and new products and better quality jobs. Rather, both books consider how we need to organise society given the knowledge-driven economy which is a response to globalisation.

Listener 23 March 2002

Keywords Business & Finance; Growth & Innovation

When you choose a target, make sure it cannot distort your real objectives. Consider the man desperate to diet, who decided at New Years not to eat between meals. He kept strictly to his resolution. By the end of February he was eating his May 23rd dinner.

Presentation to ‘First Loves’, a session at ‘Reader’s and Writer’s Week, 17 March 2002.