Listener: 31 July, 1999.
Keywords: Governance; Literature and Culture;
What have the following in common?
* The disappearance of the National Art Gallery;
* National Archives sued by its stakeholders in the High Court;
* The public outcry over the National Library’s proposed reorganisation.
* The National Trust under severe financial pressure;
* Te Papa confused with an amusement arcade;
* Radio New Zealand’s considering privatising its news service;
* The lack of local content on television.
* User charge threats to your local library;
* Victoria University of Wellington selling off a McCahon painting?
Social Policy for the 21st Century: Justice and Responsibility Proceedings of the 1999 National Social Policy Conference, 21-23 July, 1999. Social Policy Research Centre Reports and Proceedings, 1999.
Keywords: Distributional Economics; Social Policy;
Introduction
In a recent article, the London Economist describes the “bad point” of New Zealand’s economic reforms which began in the mid 1980s as “a big increase in inequality.”1 In fact the New Zealand economy has generally had a poor growth performance, higher unemployment, and a worrying current account deficit ever since the reforms (although price levels have been more stable). Table 1 is a comparison between the overall economic performance of the Australian, New Zealand and OECD economies since 1985. There is no doubt the New Zealand economy has done worse. 2 Why this has happened, and why the New Zealand economic performance has been inferior to the Australian one, belongs elsewhere. For this paper, The Economist’s observation emphasizes just how widespread is the view that New Zealand has a more unequal income distribution, as a result of the policy changes of the last one and a half decades. But The Economist comment gives no sense of the magnitude of the increased inequality, nor its causes, which are the focus of this paper.
Report on Measuring New Zealand’s Productivity
Keywords:
Growth & Innovation;
Executive Summary
The Department of Labour commissioned this study to give further consideration of the Diewart and Lawrence output series, reported in Measuring New Zealand’s Productivity (D&L (1999), called here D&L99. This exploration data base raises two issues.
Listener 17 July 1999
Keywords: Business & Finance; Regulation & Taxation;
Concerned with what he thought was the excessive influence of women in New Zealand poetry, Rex Fairburn, writing to Denis Glover in 1934, described them as the “menstrual school.” It was a silly gibe – an adolescent using words not then mentioned in polite company. The rhetoric was unforgivable, if far too typical of the New Zealand vice of pigeon-holing one’s opponents with a superficial personalised witticism, rather than cogently facing the issue being debated. That is exactly what a recent editorial of The Dominion did when it accused minister of energy, Max Bradford, of a “Return to Muldoonism”.
Listener 3 July, 1999.
Keywords: Growth & Innovation;
Half a decade ago, capitalism appeared to have triumphed over communism (if one is allowed the crudity of these descriptors). When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the Eastern European nations of the COMECON pact left the Soviet fold, looking to the West as they transformed their economies and ways of political life. The rest of the Russian Empire broke up in 1993, and they went west too. No longer is a “spectre … haunting Europe – the spectre of communism” (as Karl Marx wrote in 1848).
Extract from The Whimpering of the State. p.123-124.
Keynotes: History of Ideas, Methodology & Philosophy;
In 1931, at the age of 24 [Sutch] went to the Department of Economics at Columbia, at the time the most important in the United States, where it taught the dominant economic paradigm of the times ‘institutionalism’.(1) The neoclassical synthesis (often abbreviated to ‘neoclassical’) a combination of the macroeconomics that Keynes pioneered and the modern theory of markets (including a welfare economics which emphasises their beneficial outcomes), strongly laced with mathematical techniques only becomes important after the Second World War. Institutionalists trace their origin to Thorstein Veblin. Among the best-known are Gunnar Myrdal and John Kenneth Galbraith and Maurice Clarke, who lead inter-war Columbian economics.
Chapter 5 of The Whimpering of the State: Politics After MMP. Does not contain diagrams or endtnotes.
Keywords: Social Policy;
It was not macroeconomic policy that proved politically disastrous for Winston Peters. NZF’s economic policy unravelled over retirement policy.
Auckland University Press, 1999. 269pp.
The policy process has changed dramatically following the introduction of MMP. Fascinated by the theatre of politics, we too easily ignore the major changes in policy approaches and outcomes. Today, without an assured parliamentary majority the government has to consult over its policies rather than impose them. Along with the increasing recognition that the policies of the past have failed, the policy blitzkrieg has almost ceased and commercialisation is being shelved.
The Whimpering of the State looks at the first three MMP years with the same lively, broad -ranging and informed approach as Easton’s successful The Commercialisation of New Zealand, which described the winner-takes-all regime before 1996. Again there are case studies: health, education, science, the arts, taxation. retirement policy, and infrastructure. Policy possibilities are explored. Yet, as the title of the book suggests, any releif from the ending of Rogernomics is offset be a realistic pessimism arising from a shrewd analysis of the continuing deficiencies in New Zealand’s political and social structure. Although written for the general public, this book will also be read by politicians, policy analysts and students, and will shape policy thinking in the MMP era. Publisher’s Blurb
From The Whimpering of the State: Policy after MMP (Auckland University Press 1999) p.88-91.
Keywords: Governance; Health
Alan Schick argues that the central theme of the reforms was ‘influenced by two overlapping but distinctive sets of ideas, one derived from the vast literature on managerialism, the other from the frontiers of economics. Managerial reform is grounded on a simple principle: managers cannot be held responsible for results unless they have the freedom to act. The new institutional economics is grounded in a very old idea: people act in their own self-interest.’ In effect, Schick contrasted two approaches (or cultures) to public sector management. He only faintly praises accountability, but warmly describes responsibility as ‘a personal quality that comes from one’s professional ethic, a commitment to do one’s best, a sense of public service’.(1)
Chapter 6 of The Whimpering of the State. This was published in 1999.
Keywords: Regulation & Taxation; Social Policy;
During the writing of the 1984 Post-Election Briefing, Economic Management, Treasury economists got into a fierce argument over the purpose of taxation. Eventually a senior official, well known for his native wit, stepped into the heated fray and imposed the following opening of the relevant section of the PEB.
“The purpose of any tax regime is to raise revenue. The level of revenue will itself be dictated by the level of government expenditure and the size of the budget deficit that the government is prepared to accept.”[1]
The briefing goes on to discuss how to design a tax regime, making the obvious point that not all taxes are equally effective. Alas, such common sense has not been so evident in the public debate on taxation in the 1990s. The focus has been on taxes, with nary a reference to the government spending it provides, even though – a theme of this book – New Zealanders have a high demand for public spending on retirement incomes, health, education, and a myriad of other activities. Perhaps because taxation is the downside of such spending, those with an agenda of reducing public spending want to emphasise only its disadvantages. This chapter cannot be so irresponsible.
