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 ...

The Government has asked the New Zealand Productivity Commission (NZPC) to enquire into the resilience of the New Zealand economy to supply-chain disruptions. It wants to identify policies and ...

The tensions between different approaches to the economy are surfacing as the election nears. As we head towards next year’s election, the tensions between the coalition partners are becoming ...

The Minister of Finance says it is but, parochialism aside, are we doing anything to ensure it really is? One of the necessary skills of a politician is to hold on to at least two contradictory ...

New Zealand has ‘Scandinavian ambitions in terms of quality of life, but a US attitude to tax’: Lara Clark. One of the most perceptive remarks about New Zealand’s fiscal tension was made by former ...

What can you do when you have hit your borrowing limit and still want to spend? One option is to cut back on maintenance of your capital – say, to delay repainting the house or keeping the car in ...

This year’s Nobel awards in economics raise critical issues about the future of the world. I was not alone with high hopes when the Soviet Union collapsed. It has been good to see various nations ...

We cannot be sure, but the answer matters even in the short term. If you think you know what is happening to the economy, you have not been following it closely enough. Clearly the tenor of the ...

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 book I am currently working on – tentative title ‘In Open Seas’ – looks at the current and future New Zealand. One chapter describes the policy towards Covid using the trope of warfare. It covers ...

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 ...

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 ...