Listener April 20, 2002.
Keywords Education; Governance; Health; Labour Studies
In Graham Scott’s Business Roundtable published Public Sector Management in New Zealand”, the ex-Secretary of the Treasury provides an account of the late 1980s public management reforms with which he was closely involved. The book includes a few pages on critics of the reforms, including a half-hearted account of my views in The Whimpering of the State (and these columns). Scott writes, ‘Easton makes the extraordinary claim that reformers ignored, or sought to undermine, the personal responsibility and professionalism of the core public sector.’ I am not sure I went that far, but I did report American expert Alan Schick’s concern that there appeared to be an unaddressed tension between the reform’s managerialism with its emphasis on accountability, and professionalism which emphasises responsibility. Curiously (I will not write ‘extraordinarily’), Scott’s book does not provide much evidence that professionalism is a central concern, for its few mentions are desultory. There is more concern about ‘professional capture’, the danger that professionals will administer the system in their interests rather than the wider public good. (The issue echoes the corporate management/shareholder tension I wrote about in my last column Guard Dogs That Fail to Bark.)
Part of submission for the degree of Doctor of Science from the University of Canterbury. (April 2002)
Keywords: History of Ideas, Methodology & Philosophy;
I began studying economics at the University of Canterbury in 1962, while doing my honours science degree in mathematics, and in late 1963 took up the position of Research Assistant at the N.Z. Institute of Economic Research, completing my B.A. in economics at the Victoria University of Wellington. As a result I got a very wide training in economics – in macroeconomics, microeconomics, development economics, and public policy – covering both theory and applied economics.
Management and Shareholders
Listener 6 April, 2002.
Keywords: Business & Finance; Governance
In 1932 Adolph Berle and Gardiner Means showed that there was an increasing separation between the shareholders who legally own the corporations and the managers who control it. Their seminal insight suggests that managers may have sufficient independence to pursue their own objectives – higher pay, better conditions, prestige, technological excellence – at the expense of shareholders. (The New Industrial State by J.K. Galbraith is the best know book setting out the case.) Those committed to the pure market approach responded that the shareholder can sell the shares of under-performing companies to others whose managers would produce higher shareholder returns. They described the sharemarket as the ‘market for management’, where competition would result in higher returns to shareholders, as efficient managers took over inefficient businesses.
Overheads for a presentation to an Independent Practitioners’ Association Seminar, April 2002.
Keywords: Distributional Economics; Health;
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This work comes from a report on research being prepared by Brian Easton and Suzie Ballantyne.
This research arises from a limited grant from the Health Research Council.
It uses Statistics New Zealand data. However they only provided the data, and the results presented in this study are the work of the author, not Statistics New Zealand.
The data is based on unit records from the Household Economic Survey for the three years between 1994/5 to 1996/7. Access to the data used in this study was provided by Statistics New Zealand in a secure environment designed to give effect to the confidentiality provisions of the Statistics Act 1975.
High Skills: Globalisation, Competitiveness, and Skill Formation by Phillip Brown, Andy Green & Hugh Lauder (Oxford University Press, 2001).
Capitalism and Social Progress: The Future of Society in the Global Economy by Phillip Brown & Hugh Lauder (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2001)
NZ Journal of Adult Education April 2002.
Keywords Education; Growth & Innovation; Labour Studies
‘Knowledge-driven economies are associated with polarization and inequality rather than convergence and equality’ is the sort of challenge that our ‘Knowledge Wave’ adherents, wrapped up in rhetoric rather than analysis, would want to ignore. High Skills goes on ‘How societies tackle the problem of social exclusion and positional competition fro education, training and jobs is therefore an important pressure point for all countries’. So the writers are not rejecting the potentiality of the knowledge based economy, and its benefits – higher living standards of more and new products and better quality jobs. Rather, both books consider how we need to organise society given the knowledge-driven economy which is a response to globalisation.
