Listener 25 April, 1998.
Keywords: Globalisation & Trade; Growth & Innovation; History of Ideas, Methodology & Philosophy;
Numerous readers have asked me to reply to Debasis Bandyopadnyay’s review of my In Stormy Seas: the Post-War New Zealand Economy (7 March 1998). I do not think that quite appropriate, especially since dealing with the review’s errors and misunderstandings would be tedious to the reader. But he raised one issue so central to the economic debate, that it is useful to address it here. The review argued I was unaware of some of the current fashionable theories of the supply-side of economic growth. It did not say that I gave a quite different account of the growth process, based on the external demand side.
Even the Most Sacred of Our Icons Cannot Avoid World Trends.
Listener 11 April, 1998.
Keywords Globalisation and International Trade
In an innovative and insightful article a couple of decades ago, sociologist Geoff Fougere pointed out that there was a sense in which non-Maori New Zealand was organized on a tribal basis, where the tribal areas was the rugby football provinces. A number of factors determined the regions: community of interest (parochialism?); geographic integration, for club teams would not want to travel too far; size to be financially viable, and to be able to compete effectively against the rest of the country. The regional structure of unions evolved. At late as 1985 North Shore split off from Auckland, while there was a continuing amalgamation among smaller unions no longer viable by themselves: Golden Bay and Nelson in 1969; Wairarapa and Bush in 1971.
