Category Archives: Maori

We Must Avoid Treating Māori As Living Fossils.

There are times when tikanga needs to be broken for tikanga to survive. I recently gave a presentation on Māori economic history based on my Not in Narrow Seas. Its most important message was that Māori proved to be a very adaptable people continually evolving as new opportunities arose. The European tradition recalls the Duke…
Continue reading this entry »

A Brief History of the Māori Economy: How Things Change

Presentation to a Statistics New Zealand Seminar, 23 February, 2021. Māori involvement in the economy has been an integral part of New Zealand’s story, even if we ignore the first 500 years when there was only a Māori economy. Unlike many of our histories, Not in Narrow Seas does not. There are about 40,000 words…
Continue reading this entry »

Maori have been trapped in a poverty cycle

Dale Husband | May 15, 2018 This was published in e-tangata. Brian Easton is a 75-year-old economist, statistician, academic, historian, columnist, and author. For much of his career, he’s made a specialty of explaining to New Zealanders what’s going right and what’s going wrong in our economy. In his latest book, Heke Tangata, which was commissioned…
Continue reading this entry »

Trading Water Resource Consents

‘Iwi leaders and the Government have agreed on a deadline to sort out Maori interests in fresh water by Waitangi Day 2016.’ (News: 5 February 2015) Law and economics recognises three distinct aspects of property rights. There is the ability to use the property, the ability to transform it into something else, and the ability…
Continue reading this entry »

Ethnicity, Gender, Socioeconomic Status and Educational Achievement: An Exploration

Research Report Funded by PPTA. Completed in April 2103 and Launched 9 July, 2013. A short summary is at http://www.eastonbh.ac.nz/2013/07/how-good-is-our-schooling/   This column was rejected by The Listener. It was published in Pundit on 8 September, 2014.   Keywords: Education; Maori     Executive Summary (Conclusion)   The average PISA scores on the three dimensions of reading,…
Continue reading this entry »

How Good is our Schooling?

Presentation at Launch of ‘Ethnicity, Gender, Socioeconomic Status and Educational Achievement: An Exploration”, 9 July, 2013. The full report is here. Keywords: Education; Maori While there is much grumbling about our education system, the evidence suggests it is doing very well. Every three years the OECD surveys a sample of 15 year old students. The…
Continue reading this entry »

Exercises in New Zealand’s Demography and Economic History

This is an earlier version of a paper published in New Zealand Population Review, which was a festschrift to D. Ian Pool (Vol 7, 2011 p.178-182) Introduction In the course of writing Not in Narrow Seas: New Zealand History from an Economic Perspective I was found myself not only reporting demographic history, but using demography…
Continue reading this entry »

Water Rights and Ownership

Listener: 4 August, 2012. This column has previously advocated making greater use of market mechanisms to allocate the use of water. New Zealand has a comparative abundance of water, but we benefit if it is allotted as efficiently as possible. Those familiar with the issue acknowledge the argument, but many point out that the “P”…
Continue reading this entry »

Value in Goods Exchange

VALUE IN GOODS EXCHANGE Listener: 7 January, 2012. Keywords: Maori; Political Economy & History; My marginal contribution to maritime historian Joan Druett’s book Tupaia: Captain Cook’s Polynesian Navigator was to comment at a dinner table that the Tahitian chief’s considerable part in the development of New Zealand was hardly acknowledged. The observation was made as…
Continue reading this entry »

The Commercial Value Of Taniwha Springs

Report prepared for Te Maru o Ngati Rangiwewehi (June 2009) Keywords: Environment & Resources;  Maori; Introduction My name is Brian Henry Easton. I am an independent scholar with particular expertise in economics, social statistics and public policy analysis. I hold a D.Sc. from the University of Canterbury and am an adjunct professor at the Institute…
Continue reading this entry »

Census Income Statistics

Keywords: Distributional Economics; Maori; Statistics;  The following summarises the income statistics used in the Listener economics columns of the March 11 & 25, and April 7.  The data is derived directly from the official Population Census for the relevant years. As the column details, it is reported income including social security benefits, before tax and…
Continue reading this entry »