Eric Crampton is Chief Economist with the New Zealand Initiative.
He applies an economist’s lens to a broad range of policy areas, from devolution and housing policy to student loans and environmental policy. He served on Minister Twyford’s Urban Land Markets Research Group and on Minister Bishop’s Housing Economic Advisory Group.
Most recently, he has been looking at devolution to First Nations in Canada.
He is a regular columnist with Stuff and with Newsroom; his economic and policy commentary appears across most media outlets. He can also be found on Twitter at @ericcrampton.
Phone: +64 4 499 0790
No election platform survives contact with post-election coalition negotiations. But one outcome of the current negotiations seems rather obvious. Read more
The true state of public finances is not meant to surprise any incoming government. The Public Finance Act 1989 aimed to prevent any outgoing government from handing an incoming government the kind of horrors David Lange and Roger Douglas found in the books in 1984. Read more
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard. At least according to the Sage of Baltimore, journalist and essayist H.L. Read more
If punters at Australia’s Betfair are right, there’s an eighty-nine percent chance any government formed after Saturday’s election will have a National Party Prime Minister. But the things Betfair can’t tell us makes me miss our missing election stock market. Read more
Pro-housing policy generally tries to find ways of outflanking NIMBYs – the Not In My BackYard objectors to new development. It’s an approach well-supported in academic research and reflected in New Zealand policy. Read more
As a proud Canadian, I am occasionally compelled to draw Kiwis’ attention to the wonderful service that my homeland provides to the world. The election here has been tedious. Read more
Dr Eric Crampton talks to RNZ about media funding and regulation. Listen to the interview below. Read more
Dr Eric Crampton appeared on The Platform to talk with Sean Plunket about grocery competition and the 'weetbix war' between The Warehouse and Sanitarium. You can find a snippet of their conversation below. Read more
On Newstalk ZB's Early Edition, Dr Eric Crampton talks to Kate Hawkesby about Labour's pledge to help new supermarket retailers and warns against subsidising entry for new chains. Listen to his interview below. Read more
Wellington (Monday, 2 October 2023) - The New Zealand Initiative welcomed today’s announcement that a re-elected Labour government would ease the path for new grocers to enter the New Zealand market. But it also warned against subsidising entry. Read more
Elections are the classic zero-sum game. In a zero-sum game, one person’s gains are necessarily another’s losses. Read more
The ban on the only cold medicine that seems to work never seemed likely to work. On Friday, some twelve and a half years after John Key banned it, David Seymour announced that the ACT Party would work to restore over-the-counter access to pseudoephedrine-based cold medicines. Read more
1.1 This submission in response to the Draft Government Policy Statement on Land Transport is made by The New Zealand Initiative (the Initiative), a Wellington-based think tank supported primarily by major New Zealand businesses. In combination, our members employ more than 150,000 people. Read more
Transport funding has become an incoherent mess. In August, the Ministry of Transport released the Draft Government Policy Statement on land transport funding. Read more
In June, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand told us something surprising. It said it had never banned experts in monetary policy from serving as external members of the Monetary Policy Committee. Read more