Deaton described himself as ‘someone who's concerned with the poor of the world and how people behave, and what gives them a ...

The choice between politicos and wonks is that the politicos are better at attaining and maintaining office, but their policy ...

We should not assume that all adopted innovations are p. Jonathon Haidt’s ‘The Anxious Generation’ illustrates that sometimes ...

Congestion pricing is easier said than done. The first seminar I attended in Britain – around sixty years ago – explained a scheme for road usage pricing which would eliminate traffic congestion and ...

The untimely passing of Act’s candidate for the Port Waikato electorate throws an unexpected spanner into the 2023 election machinery. Maybe it’s time to think about how the law responds to such ...

The recent reduction in the US credit rating signals that market lenders are not happy with the US fiscal arrangements. New Zealand’s lower rating is a warning that we could do better too. Fitch ...

Alan Bollard, formerly Treasury Secretary, Reserve Bank Governor and Chairman of APEC, has written an insightful book exploring command vs demand approaches to the economy.

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 ...

A Rogernome Defends the Policies. One of the difficulties in making sense of what happened during the Rogernomics Stagnation from 1985 to 1993 is that professional economists sympathetic to its ...

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.

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 ...

Winston Peters first appeared on the national political scene when he stood for Northern Maori in the 1975 election and lost. Almost half the voters in the 2020 election had not been born then, ...