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
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
This submission in response to the Commerce Commission’s (Commission) Residential Building Supplies Market Study Preliminary Issues Paperi is made by The New Zealand Initiative (the Initiative), a think tank supported primarily by major New Zealand businesses. In combination, our members employ more than 150,000 people. 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
Research by financial journalist Bernard Hickey is showing that the wealth gap in New Zealand has widened during the pandemic. Business net worth has increased by more than $300 billion but those businesses that are struggling are being squeezed even further. Read more
Prudence is a virtue. Aristotle considered it among the nine most important. Read more
February weather forecasting on the Canadian prairies was relatively simple. Southerlies brought warmth. Read more
Dear Commerce Commission. Why can’t I parallel import a house, one piece at a time? Read more
Eric Crampton joins MagicTalk’s Wilhelmina Shrimpton to weigh up the ACT Party’s tax policy. The pair discuss the high cost of living, bracket creep, and the types of poor-value government spending that could be abolished to allow tax cuts. Read more
“We made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.” It’s a cliché from old gangster movies. Either side can just walk away from normal business negotiations if a deal is not in their mutual interest. Read more
Festivus comes but once a year – December 23rd. Observants of the holiday popularised in a decades-old episode of Seinfeld raise the aluminium pole of celebration and air their grievances. Read more
Eric Crampton discusses supermarkets, antitrust and how government and council rules have made it hard for new entrants to join the NZ market on Radio NZ Nights, hosted by Bryan Crump.
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Distance was supposed to be dead. The first dot-com boom promised an end to distance’s tyranny. Read more
Central bank independence matters. The grand bargain struck between governments and their central banks, coming out of the turmoil of the 1970s, and led by New Zealand in the late 1980s, was simple. Read more