Brian Easton

Listener 5 December, 1998.

Keywords: Business & Finance

Use $20,000 to deposit on a $100,000 house, borrowing $80,000 from the bank. Get a friendly valuer to say the house is worth $200,000. Get the bank to lend you another $80,000 against the value of the house (so you have a mortgage of $160,000). With the $80,000 of cash the bank has just given you, buy another four $100,000 houses, borrowing another $80,000 on each house. Get your pet valuer to double the price of the four new houses, so your houses are now worth a $1,000,000. You can borrow an extra $320,000. Repeat.

In D. Lamberton (ed) Managing the Global: Globalization, Employment and the Quality of LifeI.B. Tauris. (2002) Proceedings of a conference sponsored by the Toda Institute and the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, at the University of Sydney, 28-30 November, 1998. P.163-168.

Keywords: Globalisation & Trade; Social Policy;

Globalization challenges us with the question ‘what choice (or what control), if any, does a society open to the globalized world have over its social and cultural policy?’ A common view is that it will that international competitive pressures are so strong that it will drive every country down to the lowest common denominate of a pure market economy, with a minimum of government intervention.

Paper to the Labour, Employment, and Work Conference 7, at Victoria University of Wellington, November 28-29 1996, published in Labour, Employment and Work in New Zealand 1996, pp.148-156.

Keywords: Growth & Innovation; Labour Studies;

Abstract

Earlier this year Wolfgang Kasper produced a book “Free to Work: The Liberalisation of New Zealand’s Labour Markets” (Centre for Independent Studies). By reviewing this book, this paper is able to shed some understanding of the effectiveness or otherwise of the Employment Contracts Act. On the basis of the emperical evidence it is very difficult to reach, in a systematic way, Kasper’s conclusions about the beneficial effects of the ECA. In particular, the poor productivity growth rules out the likelihood that the ECA was a major contributor to the macroeconomic expansion of the mid 1990s. The Act would, however, seem to have contributed to the poor real wage growth, and the failure of many workers to obrtain a share in the increase in propserity of the 1990s.

Labour Employment and Work in New Zealand: 1998 Proceedings of a conference, 26-27 November, 1998, pp.38-46.

Keywords: Growth & Innovation; Labour Studies;

Abstract

Deindustrialisation is the phenomenon of the secondary sector growing more slowly than the rest of the economy, whether measured by share of GDP or of employment. Almost all rich OECD countries have been expereincing it. However New Zealand has been deindustrialising faster than the OECD average (even if the energy based industrie developed in the 1980s are included). The paper describes rthe phenomenon and discusses why it happened.¹

Listener 21 November 1998.

Keywords: Business & Finance

Desperately keen to go to a film in a fire-prone theatre, you choose a seat which gives you a good view, near an exit. A fire starts during the screening. You head for the door, and are crushed as everyone else does too. Your mistake is the “fallacy of composition”: that which applies for the individual, may not apply if every individual acts on it. One of my earliest lessons in economics seems forgotten today.

Listener 7 November, 1998.

Keywords: Literature and Culture;

The economy is not the ultimate end of human existence, so it would be wrong to justify the arts solely in terms of economics. Yet insofar as the arts require resources funded by the public purse, its public funding has to be subject to economic scrutiny.

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.