Monthly Archives: July 2000

Matter Of Opinion

This entry was posted in Macroeconomics & Money on by .

Listener
22 July, 2000

Keywords Macroeconomics & Money; Statistics

The premier survey of business opinion has been produced by the NZIER since 1961. When I looked at in the 1980s, I was struck by how unhelpful the business opinion question was in comparison to the questions of what the business respondents had actually done, and what they planned to do in future. These matters were not their opinions, which may or may not be well informed. They are the actions the respondents have taken and are going to take in their business lives, on such things as investment, employment, output, and inventories.

Metrology and the Economy (lecture)

This entry was posted in Business & Finance on by .

Paper to the National Measurement Conference, 14 July, 2000.

Keywords Business & Finance

In October, the Mars Climate Orbiter spacecraft burnt up in the Martian atmosphere because the acceleration data for controlling its thrusters had been provided in pounds of force (US customary units) but entered into the space craft’s computer as newtons (the SI unit). Little information was obtained from the trip, so most of its $US240 million was a complete waste. This is a spectacular example of how measurement failure can be costly, but in some ways it is misleading. The costs of a failure to have a sound measurement system are generally more subtle than that, as are the benefits. In total, a system failure from an inefficient measurement system may be relatively more expensive than the loss of a single spacecraft.

Unchanging Fashion: Pete Seeger’s Journey Of the Spirit

This entry was posted in Literature and Culture on by .

Music in the Air, No 10, Winter 2000, p.6-9.

Keywords: Literature and Culture;

Looking back over eighty years of life, as Pete Seeger may well have done in May 1999, one seeks patterns and consistencies. There is the big pattern, of course, the living the eighty years, and the consistency of having been a professional folk singer for the last sixty, with his father, Charles, as a collector of folk songs before that. From the songs he wrote and sang, one might see Seeger’s life as a jumble of topics and engagements, held together by an enthusiasm for singing, considerable technical musical skills, and an involvement in radical causes.

Budget Philosophies

This entry was posted in Listener, Macroeconomics & Money on by .

Listener 8 July, 2000.

Keywords: Macroeconomics & Money;

Just as nostalgia aint what it use to be, neither are government budget presentations. Once they were given in the evening when financial markets were closed, and were filled with surprises such as excise tax increases. Today, the budget is presented in the afternoon, there are few surprises (tax increases are announced at other times). The reduction in significance may be no bad thing. But the media still treats the budget as one of the great political events of the year. A few days later the news returns to normal, and the dispassionate observer wonders what it was all about.

The Economic Status and Health Status Project

This entry was posted in Distributional Economics, Statistics on by .

By Suzie Carson & Brian Easton

New Zealand Journal of Social Policy December 2000, p.121-128. Based on a paper presented to the 1999 Conference of the New Zealand Statistical Association, Wellington, July 5-7.

Executive Summary

The increasing use of the Household Economic Survey for policy purposes raises issues about the assumptions which are used for transforming the unit records into aggregates which underpin the social policy analysis. This paper reports upon an HRC funded project to investigate the relationship between personal health status and economic status (especially location in the household distribution, but also in relation to other measures). The project uses unit records of the Household Economic Survey for 1994/5-6/7 years when personal health status was recorded, using both objective and subjective measures. The paper explores some of the processing issues which the analysis is addressing.