Bryce is a Senior Fellow at The New Zealand Initiative, and also the Director of the Wellington-based economic consultancy firm Capital Economics. Prior to setting this up in 1997 he was a Director of, and shareholder in, First NZ Capital. Before moving into investment banking in 1985, he worked in the New Zealand Treasury, reaching the position of Director. Bryce holds a PhD in economics from the University of Canterbury and was a Harkness Fellow at Harvard University. He is a Fellow of the Law and Economics Association of New Zealand.
Bryce is available for comment on fiscal issues, our poverty, inequality and welfare research. He also has a strong background in public policy analysis including monetary policy, capital markets research and microeconomic advisory work.
Bryce was made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit in the 2025 New Year's honours for his significant contributions to public policy formation and economic research, spanning his influential work at Treasury during New Zealand's major economic reforms and his extensive research on fiscal discipline and regulatory quality.
Phone: +64 4 499 0790
A NZIER report released this week discredits a WorkSafe NZ safety programme that started in November 2011. The programme aims to reduce workplace falls from heights of below 3 metres. Read more
In 1936 the much-quoted US journalist HL Mencken wrote“government is a broker in pillage, and every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods”. So here we are in 2017, preparing to vote in yet another government spending auction of someone else’s money. Read more
Imagine if no one had to pay for anything. Wouldn’t that be nice? Read more
Are Aesop’s fables, such as “The Ant and the Grasshopper” still taught to school children? When winter arrives the industrious and thrifty ant refuses to share its food with the hungry grasshopper who had frivolously spent the summer singing. Read more
Election year budgets are when politicians massage the voters with their own money. Massage can ready a ball player, ballerina or boxer for action, or induce blissful passivity. Read more
On television early yesterday evening I saw a well-known presenter give Budget 2017 an 8 out of 10 for massaging the electorate. A subtitle read “something for everyone”. Read more
The past fortnight has seen more local news stories about scary sea-level rise and earthquake building risks. It seems these days the public is being constantly urged by scientists, engineers and others to take costly action to reduce the potential for loss from natural disasters. Read more
Last week a joint Labour/Green statement proposed a fiscal agency to keep a Labour/Green coalition government honest. Now where would they get a crazy idea like that? Read more
Official Briefings for Incoming Ministers should be worth reading. For a start, they should brief the new Minister about current issues and priorities. Read more
The Prime Minister and Finance Minister are keeping tax cuts on the agenda, despite not knowing the cost of last week's earthquakes. Economist Bryce Wilkinson from the New Zealand Initiative says tax cuts must be able to be fund. Read more
In an NBR article last week I wrote about scams in the form of public misinformation about economic inequality in New Zealand. The first one I mentioned was the assertion that inequality here has risen faster than in any other country “in recent years”. Read more
This week the United Nations named Wonder Woman honorary ambassador for the Empowerment of Women and Girls. Apparently she “will be tasked with raising awareness about Goal 5 of the UN Sustainable Development Goals”. Read more
The public is constantly told income inequality is rising and the government should do something. A recent NZ Listener article asserted inequality had risen faster “in recent years” than in almost any other developed country. Read more
There is an inequality paradox in New Zealand. Despite increasingly frequent newspaper headlines on inequality, the data shows that inequality in income and inequality in consumption have not changed substantially for at least a decade. Read more
Dr Andrew Butler and Sir Geoffrey Palmer’s new book, A Written Constitution for Aotearoa New Zealand, proposes radical changes. This is not entirely a surprise. Read more