What are Mothers Worth? (March 1979)
Fences and Ambulances: An Economist Looks at Family Policy (July 1992)
Suffer the Children (November 1993)
Approaching Family Economic Issues: Holistically or Pathologically? (October 1994)
Family Policy: Creative or Destructive? (November 1994)
The External Impact on the Family Firm (March 1996)
Review of Children of the Poor (April 1997)
Household Gods: Whatever Politicians Say, Children Interests Are Ignored (October 1997)
You’re on Your Own: the Nanny State Becomes A Hard Taskmaster (March 1998)
Poor Children (February 2001)
Is This a Healthy Budget for New Zealanders? (May 2002)
Family Policy and Family Support (September 2002)
Notes on a Commission for the Family (September 2002)
Children and their parents are the largest group of the poor (November 2002)
Treat the Kids: Why Michael Cullen Should Blow A Bit of the Budget Surplus (May 2003)
Spending the Public Growth Dividend: Why Was There So Little for Children? (May 2003)

Index of Distributional Economics

Index of The Economic and Health Status of Households Project

Also see the New Zealand Child Poverty Action Group

Address to the Wellington People’s Forum, 7 September 2002.

Keywords: Distributional Economics; Social Policy.

There is one main fact about poverty in New Zealand, which often gets lost behind a myriad of minor facts, which diverts us from the central issue. The consequence is that attempts to reduce poverty are at best inefficient, and at worst ineffective. That central fact is a substantial majority of the poor are children and their parents. This predominance of children and those who care for them is independent of the choice of poverty line. But to give an illustration, if we use the poverty line based on the deliberations of the 1972 Royal Commission on Social Security – the standard poverty line in the last thirty years – we find at least three-quarters of the poor are children and their parents. It is more than four fifth if we adjust for the more expensive housing that families with children face. Even those figures of 75 percent and 80 percent are under-estimates, if we note that in some households in which there are children there are adults other than their parents. The salient feature of poverty in New Zealand is that it is dominated by households with children in them.

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.

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.

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.

A chapter of Globalisation and Welfare State

Keywords: Distributional Economics; Social Policy;

As Chapter 3 reported, poverty has long been a phenomenon in New Zealand life. Yet in the 1970s poverty research expanded. A poverty income line was established, numbers of people below the line were calculated, some behavioral investigations were undertaken, ethnographic studies increased, and some policy measures were undertaken to reduce the incidence of poverty.

A chapter of Globalisation and Welfare State

Keywords: Distributional Economics; Social Policy;

Bill Sutch characterized the progress of nineteenth and early twentieth century New Zealand in a book title of Poverty and Progress (and also The Quest for Security).(1) Certainly there was poverty in that period, which was a major driving force for social and institutional change. It would be foolish to compare the hardships of those times with those of today. As we shall see in Interregnum 1, a major development in the 1970s was recognition that poverty was simply an absolute notion of hardship but a relative one, so that rising affluence did not automatically eliminate it. Yet there is much to be learned from the earlier poverty and policy debates.

Social Policy Journal of New Zealand, November 1997 (9), p.171-179. (1)

Keywords: Distributional Economics; Social Policy;

While it is easy to be compassionate over the magnitude and situation of the poor, it is not in their interest for researchers to be as equally sentimental in the analysis and measurement of poverty. Estimates which are not developed rigorously may be misleading, and may be so in a way which could be used against the interests of the poor. Where an estimate of the numbers of the poor is overly generous, the resolution of reducing poverty appear excessively expensive, and may delay the facing up to the issues. Wrong assessments of the composition of the poor may result in policy targeting the wrong groups. Thus policies based on faulty data are likely to be inefficient and wasteful, and in the end to be manipulated against the interests of the poor.

Thus it is incumbent on social scientists to scrutinize the work on poverty, to ensure that it is seeking high standards of analytical rigor. A recent paper by Stephens, Waldegrave and Frater (Stephens et al, 1995 – henceforth SWF) provides a useful basis to do this, albeit some of the problems it raises appear elsewhere.

New Zealand Books March 1997, p.14-16.

Keywords: Distributional Economics; Social Policy;

In 1980 the National Government withdrew the government subsidy to CORSO, nominally because it had produced a film which said that there was poverty in New Zealand. Sixteen years later a National Prime Minister was arguing what kind of poverty and how extensive it is, while the Treasury Briefing to the Incoming Government 1996 even tried to measure the extent of poverty (they called it “hardship”) although, as we shall see, not very well.