On 4 June, The Dominion Post published a lengthy and disturbing article highlighting the woes and dilemmas of earthquake safety regulation in Wellington. It highlighted the arbitrariness of current building standards and decisions. Read more
On 31 July 2022, New Zealand's borders will fully reopen. This will be a welcome development for education providers, especially those in the tertiary sector. Read more
The moderate increases in the European Central Bank’s interest rates are far from being brutal but the writing is on the wall that Europe’s monetary party is about to end, and Southern Europe has remarkable parallels to Mexico and Latin America in the 1980s. Of all the places in history, Mexico in 1982 could give us a hint about the future of European monetary policy. Read more
Bring on the bondholders. New Zealand’s proposed Three Waters Reforms, which would force the amalgamation of council water services into four large providers under convoluted governance arrangements, is an attempted solution to a real problem. Read more
Hades, God of the Greek underworld, decreed that Sisyphus, for trying to cheat death, must forever push a heavy boulder up a hill. It would roll back down again every time. Read more
A lot of problems have no good solutions – just ones that are bad in different ways. Pricing greenhouse gas emissions in agriculture is important, and every way of doing it is going to have problems. This week, the agricultural sector put up its proposed solution. Read more
Our education system is becoming a bit like a gym in which people use robots to pump iron for them. The trend began in the 1980s when hand-held calculators became cheap. Read more
A race-neutral approach to government health (and welfare) spending would give the same treatment to people in the same circumstances. It would ignore irrelevant matters such as race, ethnicity, religion, gender, or creed. Read more
Visitors to New Zealand would have heard of the “land of the long white cloud”. But as they drive around its two large main islands, they will soon think of it as the land of the three waters. Read more
There are many fashion treasures from the past that keep coming back. Long flowered dresses, cut-up jeans, or bell-bottom pants: fashion is cyclical. Read more
It’s hard to solve a problem like Working for Families. The most frustrating thing, for an economist who watches policy, are the policy dollar bills left lying around on sidewalks. Read more
The media has largely ignored economics in the last couple of years. The return of inflation, however, has brought economic topics back into people’s minds and into media coverage. Read more
We explained in our November research report "Walking the Path to the Next Global Financial Crisis" why concerns about prolonged economic stagnation, or even serious recessions, should be taken seriously. During the 2008-2010 global financial crisis, governments' responses had turned a banking crisis into a public debt crisis. Read more
Pew’s latest survey is not cause for despair – if you know a little bit about the state of public knowledge. Pew finds that only 56% of Americans know that Ukraine is not part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, NATO. Read more
The strategic implications of Putin’s war against Ukraine keep evolving as the conflict enters its fourth month. As yet another unintended consequence, it has broken the anti-EU axis between Warsaw and Budapest. Read more