Dr Eric Crampton is the Chief Economist at The New Zealand Initiative and co-author of The Case for Economic Growth. Dr Crampton 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. He is also the creator and author of the well-known blog “Offsetting Behaviour”.
Latest reports:
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
The North Island’s drought is getting rather serious. Read more
Kiwis are very likely heading into the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. Read more
One of the ideas to boost the economy in a post-Covid world is to reopen the borders for international students. Eric Crampton tells Ryan Bridge on The AM Show that New Zealand’s relatively safe status gives the tertiary sector a real opportunity to become a more desirable destination for international students. He warns that the window is closing fast and that the government must act quickly to meet the July semester deadline. Read more
National Party leader Todd Muller has said that the party will pledge pushing up the age of eligibility progressively from 65 to 67 starting in 2037. Read more
Lifeboats are tricky things. If they are overburdened, they can tip and spill everyone out. Read more
A good 2020 Budget would achieve three things. Read more
The government should have two priorities in this budget. Read more
A pre-Budget poll shows the majority of Kiwis favour ‘helicopter money’ with many fearful or uncertain about their immediate futures. Read more
Making sense of Wellington Council’s prioritisation of a new convention centre, while the city’s wastewater pipes crumble and streams fill with sewage, is a bit tough. It isn’t how you’d run a household: the new kitchen might take a back seat if the rest of the plumbing is wrecked – and especially if your partner had just been made redundant. Read more
There’s an old short-handled shovel hanging in our garden shed. The plastic handle has split, but the blade and shaft are fine. With a bit of work, that shovel could again be shovel-ready. But it isn’t just yet. Read more
Among the more irritating education fads is the idea that schools need to teach a “growth mindset”. Read more
So far the Government has announced $50 million in funding to support the media industry as it deals with a financial hit from the Covid-19 crisis. Read more
New Zealand’s universities have, at least since the mid-2000s, relied on foreign students for substantial parts of their income. Though the extent of foreign students’ contributions is obvious to anyone working in academia, they are not well appreciated outside the tertiary sector. Worse, even though reliance on income from foreign students has been designed into the tertiary sector’s funding model since the Clark administration, the Government of today seems to have forgotten, or at best underappreciated its importance. Read more
When the facts of the world change, business models must change to keep up. Legislating the world back to the way it was rarely turns out well, and cobbling together regulatory and tax measures to return the media funding environment to the 1980s seems like a mistake. Read more
Last week, the diligent Epidemic Response Committee was swarmed by a gaggle of head-honcho media types each making their case for a handout. Read more