Eric is the Chief Economist at The New Zealand Initiative. With the Initiative, he has worked in policy areas ranging from freshwater management to policy for earthquake preparedness, and from local government to technology policy. He has recently focused on policy related to Covid-19 response. He served as Lecturer and Senior Lecturer in Economics at the Department of Economics & Finance at the University of Canterbury from 2003 through 2014.
Eric’s columns and commentary appear regularly in New Zealand’s major media outlets, as well as on his blog, Offsetting Behaviour. He can also be found on Twitter at @ericcrampton .
Latest reports:
Roadmap for Recovery: Briefing to the Incoming Government (2020)
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
People are more careful when spending their own money than when spending on behalf of others. This truism is especially relevant in election years, but it applies more broadly. Read more
Our Chief Economist Eric Crampton and Max Rashbrooke joined TVNZ Breakfast to discuss the political parties' economic policies in the lead up to the election. Read more
Wealth taxes are tricky things. Even leaving aside the complications in real-world applications that caused the OECD to recommend against them, wealth taxes have an additional pernicious effect. Read more
If your main source of information on this year’s cannabis referendum were the Say Nope To Dope campaign, it would be pretty easy to imagine marijuana-leaf decorated cannabis shops on every corner. Contrary to that campaign’s full-page ads portraying classic Kiwi dairies turned into garish marijuana stores, the Cannabis Legalisation and Control Bill is rather restrictive. Read more
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. The challenge is bigger than that. Read more
Voting is not a duty. But if you do vote, you should vote well. 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. Bryce Wilkinson tallies the numbers, showing the forecasts are based on heroic projections about growth in labour productivity and on greater fiscal discipline than has been the norm. Read more
Last week, National proposed a series of policies to increase the uptake of electric vehicles. Suppose it works exactly as promised and the number of electric vehicles quadruples in the next three years. Read more
Are Kiwis taking their civics for granted? American columnist H.L. 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. Read more