Rethinking the teaching of economics
In the wake of the Global Financial Crisis, some students of economics in countries as diverse as Chile, the UK and the US asked why the curriculum they were studying at University did not deal with...
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Immigration reform spotlight: Fairness, economic development, and the Working...
Historically high net migration to New Zealand — which reached over 70,000 annual arrivals in 2017 — has spurred many social and political concerns, including about how the country’s already-strained...
View ArticleFrom Universal Basic Income to Public Equity Dividends
In 1991 I wrote advocating ‘a universal tax credit available to every adult – the Universal Basic Income (UBI) – and a moderately high flat tax rate’. In 1996 I started to develop these ideas into a...
View ArticleWhere modern macroeconomics is going wrong
There is a slowly but steadily accumulating body of criticism of the dominant economic paradigm which constitutes today’s conventional wisdom. A recent Oxford Review of Economic Policy devoted an...
View ArticleIs the government Austerian?
The neologism ‘Austerian’ is a portmanteau of ‘austerity’ and ‘Austrian’ (School of Economics). It became extensively used after the Global Financial Crisis. It describes the policies of those...
View ArticleAccounting for the government
The 1989 Public Finance Act adopted a new approach to the presentation of the government’s accounts. Its purpose was to enhance the government’s management of financial flows by combining them all into...
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The 2018 budget: Politics & economics
The first feature of the 2018 Budget is the allocation of $100 million to the America’s Cup. The politics of this are not hard to understand, but the myth of prioritising within an...
View ArticleNot the transformation we were promised
The Wellbeing Budget opens with, “What is wellbeing?”, a question that has been widely posed and little understood. Treasury says “Wellbeing is when people are able to lead fulfilling lives with...
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Budget 2019: How do we know transformation when we see it?
NZ has dethroned GDP as a measure of success, but will Ardern’s government be transformational? When you’re in politics, words are a high-stakes game. Voters and journalists hold you to them and...
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