New Zealand is a small, isolated nation and needs to design itself accordingly. We should avoid uncritically imitating larger ...

US foreign policy, especially in Latin America, has often been at the point of a gun. But the Trump Doctrine is going places ...

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 ...

Does the Autumn 2024 British budget point to a change in fiscal strategies? Many countries found their fiscal position was unsustainable, following the 2008 Global Financial Crash. Their public ...

Angus Deaton’s ‘Economics in America’ challenges the direction that economics has taken. In 2015 Angus Deaton was the sole awardee of the Bank of Sweden’s Prize in Honour of Alfred Nobel, for his ...

Do its Property Right Provisions Make Sense? Last week I pointed out that it is uninformed to argue that the New Zealand’s apparently poor economic performance can be traced only to poor regulations.

How to run a successful pressure group. In 2013 a group of idealists, led by Jordan Williams and David Farrar, established the Taxpayers’ Union. To celebrate its first decade as surely New Zealand’s ...

The proposal to organise fresh water, storm water and waste water into four entities reflects the contempt that New Zealand’s central government has for local communities. It is not the only example ...

Following the Richardson/Shipley 1990 ‘redesign of the welfare state’ – which eliminated the universal Family Benefit and doubled the rate of child poverty – various income supplements for families ...

The public service is suffering from the downgrading of the role of professionals, experts and those at the workface with the public. There is a management fashion that believes that by imposing ...

The more informed an economist is, the more they keep their head down during elections. Elections are not a time to talk about economics in a serious way. Sure, politicians talk about the economy and ...

The ACT party election manifesto will propose to introduce a Regulatory Standards Act to set a higher bar for new regulation, and test regulations against the key principles of the Regulatory ...