One Recent Economics Publication Offers Diversity, Another Ideology.
Listener: 15 February, 1997.
Keywords: Macroeconomics & Money;
Over the years I have collected a bibliography of about 500 books and article on the economic reforms since 1984, reflecting numerous accounts of what happened. It is not comprehensive – simply the items I have referred to in my writings. By a judicious selection one can select a subset of these references which demonstrates the muldoonist analysis of the reforms was correct, or a marxist one, or a crude keynesian, or a social credit one, or whatever. You would not have to do that for a new right account of the reforms. Instead you would go to a recent article “Economic Reform in New Zealand 1984-95: The Pursuit of Efficiency” by Lewis Evans, Arthur Grimes, David Teece, and Bryce Wilkinson, published in the Journal of Economic Literature.
Keynote Address to the 1997 “Engineering Our Nation’s Future” Conference of the Institution of Professional Engineers of New Zealand, Wellington, February 5th.
Keywords: Political Economy & History
Today’s lecture is work in progress, which will one day become a book called something like “The Nation Building State”. It is concerned with one of the dominant themes of New Zealand’s economic and social development, the use of the state to build the nation, and the curiosity that in the mid 1980s that theme suddenly disappeared. Engineers had a central role in this nation building, so it is good to have an opportunity to talk to you about it. After all if we do not have an understanding of our past – from whence we came from, why we are where we are – then engineers will have little influence over the nation’s future, and where we are going.
This paper was preliminary, and circulated for discussion in 1997 (This version revised in 2000). The issues it raises were taken up by Statistics New Zealand and have been largely dealt with. (A major revision has been to the household weightings. It is placed here on the website, because occassionally researchers using the earlier data ask for it. But it illustrates the universal rule of always checking one the quality of one’s data before using it
Keywords: Statistics;
Introduction
As the result of a generous grant for then Prince Albert College Trust, it has been possible to place in the public domain for research purposes, quasi-unit records (QURs) from the household economic survey (HES),[1] one of the regular surveys administered by Statistics New Zealand.
A World-leading Academic Found Not All is Well in the Public Sector
Listener: 1 February, 1997.
Keywords: Governance;
The last minute decision to make Jenny Shipley Minister of State Services may reflect looming problems in the state sector. The underlying issues are set out in a recently published report, The Spirit of Reform.
