Listener 21 September 2002.
Keywords: Growth & Innovation;
People keep going on about our low relative performance in the OECD. How bad is it?
We are 20th of the 28 countries in the OECD measure of output per capita. About 86 percent of the OECD average.
There has been much discussion on the proposed Commission for the Family. On 14 September 2002, I emailed note, which was widely circulated. Here it is – a little tidied up.
Keywords: Social Policy;
I am a little nervous about a common view which expresses a lack of enthusiasm towards the proposed Commission for the Family. The fact is it is a fait accompli, as certain as anything is in politics. Thus the approach, I would advise, is how to make the Family Commission as effective as possible.
Research Report Commissioned by NZ Drug Foundation: Released 8 September 2002
Keywords Health
Executive Summary [1]
The hepatitis C virus (HCV) usually causes chronic liver disease and other morbidities in most of those infected, and death in a minority of cases. The most common means of transmission today is from injecting drug use (IDU) through the sharing needles or other injecting equipment.
Address to the Wellington People’s Forum, 7 September 2002.
Keywords: Distributional Economics; Social Policy.
There is one main fact about poverty in New Zealand, which often gets lost behind a myriad of minor facts, which diverts us from the central issue. The consequence is that attempts to reduce poverty are at best inefficient, and at worst ineffective. That central fact is a substantial majority of the poor are children and their parents. This predominance of children and those who care for them is independent of the choice of poverty line. But to give an illustration, if we use the poverty line based on the deliberations of the 1972 Royal Commission on Social Security – the standard poverty line in the last thirty years – we find at least three-quarters of the poor are children and their parents. It is more than four fifth if we adjust for the more expensive housing that families with children face. Even those figures of 75 percent and 80 percent are under-estimates, if we note that in some households in which there are children there are adults other than their parents. The salient feature of poverty in New Zealand is that it is dominated by households with children in them.
Listener 7 September, 2002.
Keywords: Macroeconomics & Money;
Don Brash recently claimed that ‘almost none of the big changes of the late 1980s and early 1990s have been reversed’ and described those who denigrate the economic policies of the 1990s as talking ‘cattle manure’. This may be inappropriate language for the National Party’s front bench economic spokesperson, but the greater worry is that he seems to be keener to repeat the past, than to learn from its mistakes.
