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A TAXING YEAR: The election rhetoric is likely to be about taxation.

Listener: 30 January, 2005.

Keywords: Regulation & Taxation;

Some decades ago, the political Left retreated from its historic role of engaging with economics to provide a critique of the modern capitalist economy. Nowadays, insofar as it discusses the economy at all, other than in terms of nostalgia – things were better in the past – the focus is on redistribution: how the output of the economy should be shared. It is not an unimportant question, but it is not the whole of economics.

30th January 2005 | Comments Closed

FREE BEER TOMORROW

Yeah right. No wonder there is reform exhaustion.
 
Listener: 15 January, 2005.
 
Keywords: Growth & Innovation; Political Economy & History; 
 
For 40-odd years, economic pundits have been telling us that our economic output is growing too slowly, and that we should adopt their policies to accelerate it. Sometimes we have, but before long more pundits come along to [...]

15th January 2005 | Comments Closed

IN DEFENCE OF GLOBALIZATION: (Review)


by Jagdish Bhagwati (Oxford University Press, 308 pp. $72.95) ISBN 0-19-517024-3, reviewed in New Zealand International Review, January/February 2005, Vol XXX, No 1, p.31-32.

Keywords: Globalisation & Trade;

The economics student struggling though the mind-numbing theory of international trade will eventually hit upon learned papers by Columbia University economist Jagdish Bhagwati, whose contributions make him a candidate for an economics prize in honour of Alfred Nobel. They will soon learn that beyond his painstaking rigour he has a total commitment to free trade. So there was much glee among anti-globalisers when he rejected some aspects of globalisation. There may be less as a result of his latest book In Defence of Globalization.

7th January 2005 | Comments Closed

DULL, PHILISTINE AND CONFORMING: How Have We Changed Over The Years?

Listener: 1 January, 2005.

Keywords: Political Economy & History;

Returning after graduate studies at Oxford and war service in Europe, M K (Michael Kennedy) Joseph thought the New Zealand of the late 1940s and 1950s was dull, philistine and conforming. He famously expressed his reservations in “Secular Litany”, which begins:

1st January 2005 | Comments Closed