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Welcome to Brian Easton's Website

I am an independent scholar especially interested in New Zealand. My writings and research are especially concerned with its economics, history, politics, sociology and culture.

This website is to make more available some of my writings and the research which underpins them. Because there is an enormous backlog, only some of the material is available, although I am adding most weeks.

Brian�s Writings on the Great Financial Crisis are at http://www.eastonbh.ac.nz/?p=948

This website is only possible because of help from my son, Tamatea Easton. I am grateful for his invaluable assistance.

ICEBERGS AHEAD

What the Government’s strategy is likely to be for the upcoming Budget.
Listener: 15 May, 2010
Keywords: Macroeconomics & Money;
One “crisis” strategy is to announce that something is desperately wrong, which needs a dramatic policy change to fix it. Closer inspection shows the claim is more hysteria than careful assessment; the new policy benefits those advocating it [...]

ANOTHER REDISORGANISATION

Why is the Government proposing public-sector mergers for so little apparent benefit?
Listener: 1 May, 2010.
Keywords: Governance;
At a certain point in the political cycle, governments start following officials’ agendas that make no political sense but meet some administrative need.
All policy changes upset the people whose interests are harmed. These changes often reflect a cool political calculation [...]

THE CHALLENGE OF GLOBALISATION

Presentation to an EPMU seminar, 29 April, 2010
Keywords: Globalisation & Trade; Labour Studies;
Twenty years ago the Engineering Union commissioned me to think about the alternative to Rogernomics. According to the last prime minister, Helen Clark, my report Open Growth was influential on the last Labour Government�s economic strategy, although it was not totally implemented; curiously [...]

THE NEW ZEALAND ECONOMY

This was an entry for a venture which did not proceed. (April 2010)
Keywords: Political Economy & History;
Introduction
While New Zealand has about 0.1% of the world�s population, its economy produces about 0.3% of the world�s material output. Based on this material output (GDP per capita) the OECD places it in the middle to lower end of [...]

TAKING STOCK

Why more townies should spend an occasional day on a farm.
Listener: 17 April, 2010.
Keywords: Business & Finance;
Occasionally a townie should go to a field day on farming, as I did recently at Glenside Station, near Gladstone in the Wairarapa. Covering 1125ha and carrying about 10,000 stock units � mainly sheep and beef but also deer [...]

Brian Easton