Paul Krugman described behavioural economics as the most important innovation in the economics discipline for half a century.

The Minister of Health is one of the toughest jobs in Cabinet. In comparison, being Prime Minister or Minister of Finance is easy. Recovering from an emergency operation, unable to move with all the ...

How to run a successful pressure group. In 2013 a group of idealists, led by Jordan Williams and David Farrar, established the Taxpayers’ Union. To celebrate its first decade as surely New Zealand’s ...

What might the public’s increasing demands for safety and security tell the economist? Criminology and economics are quite different disciplines. Someone from one discipline trespasses on the other ...

A Rogernome Defends the Policies. One of the difficulties in making sense of what happened during the Rogernomics Stagnation from 1985 to 1993 is that professional economists sympathetic to its ...

Industrial policy is once more on the agenda of many governments. There is a long history of Industrial Policies (IP) aimed at promoting a particular sector of an economy. When Henry VIII abandoned ...

The recent reduction in the US credit rating signals that market lenders are not happy with the US fiscal arrangements. New Zealand’s lower rating is a warning that we could do better too. Fitch ...

Apply the golden fiscal rule and invest prudently. A lender is greatly disadvantaged compared to a borrower. The borrower gets the cash immediately. In exchange, the lender gets a promise that the ...

The (new) Prime Minister said nobody understands what co-governance means, later modified to that there were so many varying interpretations that there was no common understanding. Co-governance ...

Implementing the New Zealand Health and Disability System review not only involves major technical problems but creates fascinating political tensions. The government is promising to redisorganise the ...

Do its Property Right Provisions Make Sense? Last week I pointed out that it is uninformed to argue that the New Zealand’s apparently poor economic performance can be traced only to poor regulations.

The Treasury economic forecasts for May budgets are usually settled in April to feed into the fiscal forecasts and, critically, the borrowing program. They can be changed in the interim six weeks if ...