Eric is the Chief Economist at The New Zealand Initiative and co-author of The Case for Economic Growth. He served as Lecturer and Senior Lecturer in Economics at the Department of Economics & Finance at the University of Canterbury from November 2003 until July 2014.
Eric is also the creator and author of the well-known blog “Offsetting Behaviour”.
Latest reports:
Democracy in the Dark (2020)
Safe Arrivals (2020)
Policy Point: Open for minds: export education and recovery (2020)
Policy Point: Stay on Target (2020)
Research Note: Effective Treatment: Public policy prescription for a pandemic (2020)
Policy Point: Time to Process (2020)
Research Note: Seeing the problem, but missing the point: Decile dilemmas (2019)
Research Note: The Unreserved Bank of New Zealand: Why unorthodox monetary policy needs boundaries (2019)
Policy Point: Biting education bullets (2019)
Refreshing Water: Valuing the priceless (2019)
Score! Transforming NCEA Data (2018)
Recipe for disaster: Building policy on shaky ground (2018)
Analog Regulation, Digital World (2017)
The Outside of the Asylum: A New Zealander’s guide to the world out there (2017)
Decade of Debt: The Cost of Interest-free Student Loans (2016)
Deadly Heritage (2016)
In the Zone: Creating a Toolbox for Regional Prosperity (2015)
The Case for Economic Growth (2015)
Phone: +64 4 499 0790
Anybody who watches house prices in Wellington will realise there is a mismatch between demand for homes and supply. Wellington City’s Draft Spatial Plan attempts to address this and the fact that over the next 30 years an extra 80.000 will move to Wellington. Read more
Wellington City’s Draft Spatial Plan, currently out for consultation, asks where the city might find room for another 50-80,000 people over the next thirty years. Read more
Voting is not a duty. But if you do vote, you should vote well. Casting an informed ballot matters. Read more
The real fun in Treasury fiscal updates is rarely in the headlines. It’s rather in the finer print where the assumptions underpinning the main estimates are laid out, and where different scenarios are played out. Read more
Treasury’s pre-election fiscal update makes for grim reading. Read more
Last week, National proposed a series of policies to increase the uptake of electric vehicles. Read more
In this week’s New Zealand Initiative podcast, a new report on the state of civics knowledge in New Zealand reveals Kiwis have a bit of work to do before the election next month. Read more
Are Kiwis taking their civics for granted? American columnist H.L. Mencken once quipped that democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. Read more
Eric Crampton talks to Duncan Garner on The AM Show about our survey that shows a shocking lack of civics knowledge amongst New Zealanders. He says it is hard to vote well if you don't know the basics. Read more
How much of what Kiwi voters should know about democracy do they really know? Our Chief Economist Eric Crampton discusses the results of our new report on the state of civic knowledge in New Zealand on TVNZ Breakfast. Read more
Our new report Democracy in the Dark shows that almost a third of New Zealanders cannot name the political parties currently in parliament. Less than half of the one thousand people surveyed understood how New Zealand's political system MMP, works. Read more
Last week’s UNICEF report on child wellbeing gets one big thing very right. Important parts of government policy are failing children. But the problem is hardly as simple as inequality in household incomes, which UNICEF’s local representative suggested is the root cause. Read more
It wasn’t that long after the Christchurch earthquakes that the calls for rent control came. The earthquakes had destroyed thousands and thousands of homes. Things were really rather dire. We lived in South New Brighton at the time; our neighbour had people living in her garden shed. Read more
If we take one overarching political lesson from the Government’s “shovel-ready” spending fiasco and the school of environmental voodoo, it’s this: Principles are dangerous things. It’s best not to have them. Read more
Cartography geeks might remember the isochronic maps of the late 19th and early 20th century. Covid’s time-warp is making them relevant again, and possibly for rather longer than we might hope. Read more