Oliver is the Executive Director of The New Zealand Initiative. Before joining the Initiative, he was a Research Fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney, the Chief Economist at the Policy Exchange in London, and an advisor in the UK House of Lords.
Oliver holds a master's degree in economics and business administration and a PhD in Law from Bochum University in Germany.
Oliver is available to comment on all of the Initiative’s research areas.
Phone: +64 4 499 0790
Standing atop Mount Victoria last Sunday, looking over Wellington basked in glorious sunshine, I was quietly confirming to myself that I really wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. Not in Germany where I grew up. Read more
Last week, I gave a speech to Auckland University’s economics club called The never-ending Euro crisis – Anatomy of an economic policy disaster. It was a wide-ranging presentation in which I covered the history and pre-history of European monetary union, Europe’s fiscal and monetary problems, the eurozone’s governance issues and their political implications. Read more
In September last year, I wrote about the German constitutional court’s preliminary ruling on the legality of the European Stability Mechanism (Has Germany’s court set the stage for an exit? 20 September 2012). Read more
The economics of the opposition’s plan to introduce a single-buyer model for wholesale electricity is highly dubious, as I explain in my column in The National Business Review today. But that’s not the only questionable thing about it. Read more
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As a great Monty Python fan, one of my favourite scenes is from their movie Life of Brian. As a group of Judean conspirators against the Roman occupation gather, the rhetorical question is asked what those awful Romans had ever done for them. Read more
In early March, we were worried about Italy after the Italians had elected a parliament with no clear majorities. In late March, we got concerned about Cyprus because the European Union’s misguided crisis management undermined confidence in the safety of bank deposits across the eurozone. Read more
Last week, considerations to raise the speed limit on some of New Zealand’s open roads made headlines. The current speed limit of 100 km/h has not changed for about half a century – a period that has seen improvements to both cars and roads. Read more
Manufacturers and exporters have been complaining about the high Kiwi dollar for a long time. Opposition politicians are openly toying with the idea of changing the Reserve Bank’s mandate to manipulate the exchange rate downwards. Read more
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The election of Argentinian Cardinal Jose Mario Bergoglio to the papacy may not matter much to non-Catholics. But the public’s reaction to Pope Francis’ display of humility has a lot to say about our times. Read more
When I last wrote about Cyprus, the eurozone faced a political and economic dilemma in its smallest member state (The spectre protecting a sinful little Cyprus, January 24). With last weekend’s bailout, Europe’s politicians have once again managed to make a bad situation worse. Read more
If you filled in your census forms last week, you would have had to answer question number 13: "In which language(s) could you have a conversation about a lot of everyday things?" The wording of the question is clumsy. I wonder how our statisticians define ‘a lot of’, what they mean by ‘everyday’, and whether ‘things’ could have been more specific. Read more