Brian Easton

Listener 17 October, 1998.

Keywords: Globalisation & Trade; Macroeconomics & Money;

While I was recently analyzing a government report for a class, a student (who apparently worked on it) became increasingly agitated, asking what was my alternative proposal. Not worrying about analysis, but pursuing policy, is a characteristic Wellington foible. The same fallacy applied to the economists who criticized economist Paul Krugman when he was here. They did not suffer from the disadvantage of having read his analysis, which was considerably more subtle and sophisticated than the critics thought. You dont successfully spend time in top US university economics common rooms and the US economics circuit, without developing powerful defences to the elementary points the New Zealand critics made.

Listener 10 October, 1998.

Keywords: Governance;

The new Minister of Local Government, Tony Ryall, began his first address with “Local Government is an important part of our economy. It’s 3.5 percent of our country’s GDP. Local government can either help the country or it can hinder. With the problems of Asia bearing down on us, every part of the economy has a role to paly in helping our nation weather the storm. Local Government must contribute to the international competitiveness of New Zealand exporters through good infrastructure, efficient regulation, and control over costs.”

Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, Volume Four (1921-1940), 1998, p.21-22.

Keywords: Political Economy & History

Bernard Carl Ashwin played a key role in transforming the New Zealand government’s approach to economic management in the 1930s and 1940s. He was born in Paeroa on 22 September 1896, the second of eight children of Manley John Ashwin, a storekeeper, and his wife, Clara Elizabeth Foy. Ashwin left Cambridge District High School after two years, working initially for a local lawyer and a bank before becoming a cadet in the Department of Education in Wellington in 1912. By his own account his late adolescence was a time of sport rather than earnest endeavour. It was ended by the First World War, in which, as a sapper and driver in the New Zealand Divisional Signal Company, he was wounded shortly before the cessation of hostilities.