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
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine combined with a global pandemic and a Reserve Bank that has forgotten its core inflation mandate do not make a case for cutting petrol excise and road user charges. And yet, here we are. Read more
The Government has reduced fuel excise duty and public transport costs to help curb rising living costs. Eric Crampton talks to Wallace Chapman on Radio NZ - The Panel about how effective this will be. Read more
The Commerce Commission’s final report into retail grocery competition, released this morning, recommends legalising new grocery stores. While it is not formally illegal to start a new supermarket chain, zoning and regulatory barriers make it effectively impossible. Read more
Top economists agree on climate response Wellington (Tuesday, 8 March 2022) The second New Zealand Economics Experts Survey finds consensus among the country’s top economists on climate policy. The New Zealand Association of Economists, in conjunction with The New Zealand Initiative, invited Distinguished Fellows, life members, and former Presidents of the New Zealand Association of Economists, and recipients of the NZIER ‘Economist of the Year’ award, to serve as an expert panel. Read more
Wellington (Tuesday, 8 March 2022) The New Zealand Initiative is applauding the Commerce Commission for their final report into supermarket competition, and says the regulator is right to take issue with the red tape that hinders competitors entering the market. The Commission recommended easing zoning restrictions so that it is legal to build supermarkets in more places, removing restrictive covenants that hinder supermarket development in prime sites, and ensuring that the Overseas Investment Act and the Sale and Supply of Alcohol Act do not unduly impede entry and expansion. Read more
The latest survey of New Zealand economists provides a clear steer for climate policy. Rather than use policies like fuel economy standards for imported vehicles, which target emissions already covered by the Emissions Trading Scheme’s cap on net emissions, the government should simply tighten the cap more quickly. Read more
The National Party has promised to cut taxes and raise income tax brackets. Who will win and who will lose when taxes are cut? Read more
National wants to reverse the current Government's tax increases and adjust income tax brackets. Newstalk ZB's Mike Hosking, talks to Robyn Walker, Deloitte Tax Partner, and Eric Crampton about National's tax plans and whther they make sense. Read more
The government’s Covid testing system has fallen apart and we are now largely flying blind, as Siouxsie Wiles put it. But it is worse than that. Read more
The coming weeks of Covid are going to be very grim. Kiwis became far too accustomed to waiting for Government guidance rather than weighing risks ourselves. Read more
There is never a shortage of economic opinions among commentators – but what is the expert consensus among economists? Eric Crampton talks to Ben Craven about the new Economic Experts Survey, what the discipline agrees on, and the danger of faddish economic beliefs in the public sector. Read more
You’ve heard all the jokes before: If you laid all the economists in the world end to end, they still wouldn’t reach a conclusion; put 10 economists in a room and you’ll get 11 opinions; economics is the only field where two people can share a Nobel Prize for saying opposite things. While the first two are purely speculative, that last one actually happened, in 1974. Read more
It’s the standard critique of local government, and it’s often right. Councillors and mayors are more interested in spending a lot of money on flashy convention centres than on maintaining the pipes. Read more
It is hardly the highest-profile job in the country, but it is one of the more important ones. The members of the Monetary Policy Committee of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand set the country’s monetary policy. Read more
What passes for economics in Wellington has seemed increasingly out of step with the academic consensus. Ideas long dismissed by academic economists as mad or harmful become trendy in Wellington circles. Read more