We reacted to the storm surges as usual. Initial panic, then a lot of constructive support of one another. In the future we shall spend a fortune remedying the infrastructural damage, much of which we ...

This column started out to explain how the proposed structural outsourcing of public surgery was partly a consequence of the peculiarities of our fiscal borrowing practices. In summary, the ...

What might the public’s increasing demands for safety and security tell the economist? Criminology and economics are quite different disciplines. Someone from one discipline trespasses on the other ...

Is there a German word for the feeling you get when someone famous dies who created glorious, uplifting art, or music or oratory or cover drives but whom you never met but wished you had? Wished and ...

Do some offshore trends presage the future of New Zealand politics? The British Labour Party took a pasting in the local body elections and the Hartlepool by-election earlier in May. Given the ...

As Lady Bracknell almost said, ‘to lose one may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two looks like carelessness.’ And so a second Government Statistician has made a hasty exit, The official reason in ...

We may regret we have not put enough effort into building resilience. I was wrong when I argued that the Muldoon Government should have hiked petrol tax to ration petrol when it ran short following ...

Legitimate pressures on government spending suggest we are going to have to raise total tax revenue or suffer a poorer quality New Zealand. About a decade ago, I was on the external Treasury panel ...

What is happening in the world economy? Think of an economy like a wobbly bicycle. Providing it is going forward, it travels reasonably well. Sometimes it stops, at which point it may fall over and ...

Speculative bubbles have occurred in the New Zealand housing market Speculative bubbles are common. The Global Financial Crisis of 2008 was an example, as was the New Zealand finance companies’ crash ...

Can we trust the Trump cabinet to act in the public interest? Nine of Trump’s closest advisers are billionaires. Their total net worth is in excess of $US375b ...

In this column I use the less familiar measure of GDP per capita instead of the GDP measure favoured by the commentariat. I became familiar with it when I began doing international comparisons because ...