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 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

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 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

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

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

A dark part of me hopes the government’s employment insurance scheme is enacted exactly as proposed. It will be terrible. Read more

Toward the end of the classic Vietnam war film Apocalypse Now, Captain Willard finally found the object of his quest: the mad Colonel Kurtz. Kurtz asked whether Willard agreed with their superiors who believed that Kurtz’s methods were unsound. Read more