The market will generate a good environmental outcome if all the property rights are allocated, providing transaction costs are zero.
Listener: 28 August, 2004.
Keywords: Environment & Resources;
As George Soros remarked, policy regimes are like marriage: whichever one you’re in, you wonder if another might be better. Thus it is with the Resource Management Act. We seem to have forgotten the shambolic arrangements that the Act swept away. But the RMA can be improved.
This paper was written in august 2004, for no particular purpose other than to clarify my own ideas.
Part II
Keywords: Growth & Innovation; History of Ideas, Methodology & Philosophy;
Either this kind of aggregate economics appeals or it doesn’t. Personally I belong to both schools. Robert Solow (1957)
To 1974: The Aggregate Supply-side Paradigm
The Crucial Experiment of 1974
1975 to 1981
1981 to 1986
The Grand Policy Break and Economic Modelling
The Intervention and Allocation Debate
Leaving the Institute
1986 to 1997
International Comparisons
Bryan Philpott
The Economy After 1985
Looking for the Recovery
Paradigms of New Zealand Economic Growth: A Memoir II
The Double Step Chart
After 1997
Back to Econometric Estimation
Characterising Economic Growth
Standard Growth
Turbo-growth
The Effect of Shocks
Paradigm Conflict
This paper was written in August 2004, for no particular purpose other than to clarify my own ideas.
Part I
Keywords: Growth & Innovation; History of Ideas, Methodology & Philosophy;
The Economic Prognosis is Not Good for the Latest Russian Revolution
Listener: 27 January, 1996
Keywords: Political Economy & History;
Recently economist Rufus Dawe described himself, in the National Business Review, as the Trotsky of the rogernomics revolution. Who he had in mind as the Lenin and the Stalin of rogernomics is unclear. Trotsky said of Stalin that his rise to power was evidence of the mediocrity of the system.
Comparing the US and New Zealand tax systems is comparing rotten apples with quality kiwifruit.
Listener: 14 August, 2004.
Keywords: Regulation & Taxation;
Far too much of the New Zealand economic debate is overwhelmed by the colonial cringe, an obsequious respect to overseas economics, with a failure to recognise that New Zealand circumstances are frequently different. Each May, a Business Roundtable press release, dutifully reported in the business pages, announces “Tax Freedom Day”, the day up to which – so it says – everyone is paying taxes to the government and after which all one earns is tax-free. The idea comes from the US right-wing think tank, the Tax Foundation, and is strongly contested in the US as misleading, because it ignores the fact that one also gets benefits from paying those taxes.
When the international price of cotton and sugar is raised, why should we be pleased?
Listener: 31 July 2004.
Keywords: Globalisation & Trade;
As unlikely as it may seem, cotton and sugar are playing a vital role in New Zealand’s economic prospects. A World Trade Organisation panel has just found in favour of a Brazilian – and others – complaint that the US is subsidising or “dumping” its exports of cotton. The panel concluded that the US action depresses international cotton prices, so other cotton exporters are getting lower than free – or fair – market prices. It rules that the dumping must stop.
A Report prepared in February 2003.
Keywords: Growth & Innovation; Statistics;
Contents
Introduction
What is GDP?
Comparing GDP Through Time
Comparing GDP Between Countries: Purchasing Power Parity
How Satisfactory is the Adjustment?
Comparisons Through Time
Scaling PPP adjusted GDP
Ranking by GDP
Does GDP Measure Economic Welfare?
Alternative Measures to GDP
Notes
Listener: 17 July 2004.
Keywords: Political Economy & History;
Only two ministers opposed the Labour Cabinet’s proposal for a flat income tax in December 1987. A month later, one, Prime Minister David Lange unilaterally canned the proposal because it would make the poor worse off. The other was Michael Cullen, then Minister of Social Welfare, now Minister of Finance.
Listener: 10 July 2004.
Keywords: Political Economy & History;
‘The Hidden Irish: Ulster: New Zealand Migration and Cultural Transfers’, a conference of the Irish-Scottish Studies Programme of the Stout Research Centre, 29-31 July, 2004.
Keywords: Political Economy & History;
John Ballance was the first New Zealand premier to die in office, and is the second youngest to so die – at 54 years and a month, 30 months later than Norman Kirk. Like Kirk he was premier for a very short time, 26 months – although he had earlier been a cabinet minister for a total of four and a half years. Yet his premiership was one of the most important in New Zealand’s history, even if it gets forgotten behind that of his immediate successor, Richard John Seddon.
Presentation to the Annual Conference of the Industry Training Federation, 16 July, 2004, Wellington.
Keywords: Education; Labour Studies;
Economists are not very good at forecasting the future. I look at what I wrote twenty years ago, and realise just how much I got it wrong. Or you might consider that before you is one of the first New Zealand university students to use a mainframe computer, someone who encouraged his children to use ZX81s, who was probably one of the first economists in New Zealand to use a PC (a 186), and who still failed to forecast the ICT revolution.
Presentation to Hamilton Branch of the NZIIA, July 20, 2004.
Keywords: Globalisation & Trade;
In late 2003 I was awarded a three year Marsden Grant to study globalisation and New Zealand’s role in it. Globalisation is a topic I have been long working upon, developing out of my earlier study of the New Zealand economy summarised in my book In Stormy Seas: The Post-War New Zealand Economy, whose theme was that the fate of New Zealand will be largely a consequence of what happens overseas, together with our ability to seize the opportunities and manage the problems. This paper sketches the research program, and looks at one of the issues – international trade.
The Constitutional Underpinnings of the United States Economic Performance.
Presentation to a Fulbright New Zealand Meeting, August 3 2004.
Keywords: Globalisation & Trade;
I am not going to spend a lot of time thanking Fulbright New Zealand for its generous and visionary grant. The real value is demonstrated by its influence on my thinking. Today’s lecture and my subsequent work is the gratitude.