Listener 23 June 2001.
Keywords Macroeconomics & Money
Most of the public comment on the government’s May budget was on the lack of growth of social spending. This overlooked that in a typical year the government has a little less than a billion dollars extra to spend from economic growth, after allowing for price and population increases. After some has been spent on really urgent items (like increasing bio-security) and necessary repairs to failed past policies (the cervical smear program) there is perhaps $750m left. That total is less, say, than the spending that advocates for Education or Heath or Social Welfare are each demanding for their sectors alone. Inevitably many (quite reasonable) demands are not met. Their advocates are irate, but rarely suggest cutting back on other government expenditures or raising taxes. Last year was unusual because the incoming government raised income taxes and so had more than normal to spend. This year (and in most years) it did not, so there is not the same expansion on government spending.
Presentation to the National Library Society: 13 June, 2001.
Keywords Political Economy & History
I thought it might be interesting to describe how The Nationbuilders came to be written. It is a useful exercise because books are linear and readers – beginning at the beginning and reading through to the end – may think that is the way each is written. Some books are, but many are not – including this one. Let me tell you how it was.
Listener 9 June 2001
Keywords History of Ideas, Methodology & Philosophy; Macroeconomics & Money
Every country has its own deeply held and specific cultures, arising from the particularities of its history and geography. Economics is prone to overlook this proposition because it aims to provide a ‘scientific’ theory of economic behaviour which is culture independent. A nice example of the resulting difficulties will be found in US economist Todd Buchholz’s New Ideas from Dead Economists. One chapter is devoted to ‘The Public Choice School: Politics as Business’, centred on the work of Nobel economic prize-winner James Buchanan, who like Buchholz lives in the Washington conurbation near the centre of the US government. The theory was very influential in New Zealand’s public sector reforms from the late 1980s.
Paper to the 2001 Conference of the New Zealand Pain Society, June 8, 2001, published in New Zealand Pain Society Journal, Issue 3, September 2001, p.13-16.
Keywords: Health;
The initial concern when health economics first began as a part of the economics discipline – about 40 years ago – was ‘productive efficiency’, the extent to which the costs of any particular treatment could be reduced, thus focussing on the relative merits of different treatments of the same medical condition. However economists soon faced the necessity to compare the resource consequences of different medical conditions – ‘allocative efficiency’. The problem arises because ‘health’ is not a simply defined concept with a single index of performance – unlike material production which is measured by GDP – so comparisons between health outcomes are deeply problematic. (There is no policy problem here if health care is delivered entirely by the market mechanism of private payment, for the market implicitly resolves the difficulty by the sick’s payments on the basis of their perception and their ability to pay. But there is no country in the world where this applies.) Any comparison of the health status of two persons also involves deep philosophical issues, which practical economists may avoid, but which still lurk under their pragmatic solutions.
