Presentation to a Post-budget Breakfast Seminar sponsored by the PHA (24 May)
Keywords: Distributional Economics; Social Policy
The Child Poverty Action Group is an Auckland based group committed to addressing the economic and associated difficulties that children and their families face. It is grateful for the invitation from the Public Health Association to speak to you. Susan St John, their economic adviser, who has a sterling record in this area, asked me to make a presentation on her behalf. I am going to briefly summarise some of Susan’s recent work, reported in a paper Financial Assistance for the Young: New Zealand’s incoherent welfare state. Then at the end of a short presentation on an enormous and very important topic, add a couple of comments of my own.
Listener May 18 2002
Keywords: Political Economy & History
The breakup with the Alliance was probably inevitable, although had the government not committed troops to Afghanistan it may have happened after the election. While there were particular and personal elements in the party breakup, it also must be seen in the context of the conventional political spectrum. Labour, under Helen Clark, has command of the political centre of New Zealand, the party shifting from its centre-left traditions. No centre-left party could have readily engaged with Afghanistan (not after Vietnam) while its economic advisers include many rogernomes. The impression is its economic policy framework is essentially a continuation of the late 1980s, with a few minor modifications: a kinder gentler rogernomics?
New Zealand Herald 07.05.2002
Keywords: Globalisation & Trade; Macroeconomics & Money
Should New Zealand form a currency union with Australia, just as until recently Argentina did with the United States dollar? A fixed exchange rate between two markets is clearly advantageous to the exporter, whose one ambition is to sell to Australia. But more than 80 per cent of exporters and 90 per cent of the economy have other ambitions.
The Bill of Rights and the National Library and Archives
Listener 4 May, 2002.
Keywords Governance, Political Economy & History
While I have considerable sympathy for historian Jamie Belich’s plea to teach more New Zealand history in our schools, the Seventh Form course on the Tudors and Stuart periods is attractive, given its foundational role in the development of Westminster style governance. Or I thought it was attractive, until I learned that the study ends in 1660. …
SPRC Newsletter No 82, November 2002, p.6-7.
Keywords: Distributional Economics; Social Policy
In their article Beware the Mean!, Peter Saunders and Tim Smeeding argue that median household is a superior reference point for establishing a poverty line than mean household income, concluding ‘Put bluntly, the use of a poverty line linked to mean poverty income produces excessively high poverty rates that tend to increase by more when poverty is rising but to fall by less when poverty is falling.’ The purpose of this note is to demonstrate that poverty lines based on a fixed proportion of the median income are subject to a fatal flaw, illustrating the consequences of the flaw with recent New Zealand experiences.
Letter to “N.Z. Political Review”, Autumn 2002.
Keywords: Political Economy & History
While there is some dispute as to what a reviewer owes an author there is no doubt that he or she has obligations to the review’s readers, obligations which Simon Boyce manifestly fails to meet in his so called ‘review’ of my The Nationbuilders (Nov/Dec 2001).
Revised paper presented to the Rotorua Branch of the Royal Society of New Zealand, 1 May 2002
Keywords Growth & Innovation; Political Economy & History
The Nationbuilders is a book about the economic social and cultural development of New Zealand from 1932 to 1984 when a group of visionary New Zealanders developed the nation. The story is told through a set of biographical essays, but while some have read the chapters separately for the individual stories, in fact the book has a series of themes, which the lives illustrate.
