Reports & Media

As George W. Bush allegedly once said, “the problem with the French is that they don’t have a word for entrepreneur.” That may not be entirely correct as the French may be short of business sense but certainly not of words. Read more

The good news about New Zealand's economy just keeps on coming. Business confidence is at a record high, employment is increasing, as are wages. Read more

Economists can agree about many things. The importance of tradable property rights in scarce fresh water is a case in point. Read more

Recently at the Initiative’s annual retreat dinner, management guru Tom Peters gave a resounding presentation on the importance of investing in people, first and foremost. Education, he argued, must be the number one priority. Read more

It is election year and political opponents will soon take the gloves off to cast the usual aspersions on each other based on which side of the political spectrum they sit on. Right-leaning politicians are likely to be cast as devotees of Wall Street arch-villain Gordon Gekko and his “greed is good” ethos, the left drafted into the poor-and-jealous brigade, and more environmentally minded parties cast as caring more about trees than people. Read more

In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Polonius’s sage advice to his son about friendship was: “Neither a borrower nor a lender be For loan oft loses both itself and friend. In contrast, borrowing and lending between complete strangers makes the world a better place. Read more

Given the troubles of Europe’s welfare states, it is hard to deny that large public sectors have a negative impact on economic growth. Where government grows too big it crowds out private activity, redirects resources from productive to unproductive uses, and stifles the economy with extra regulation and bureaucracy. Read more

Fiscal surpluses are in sight, export prices are extraordinarily high relative to import prices, national income growth prospects look brighter than for many years, and this is a general election year. This sets the stage for unsustainable increases in government spending - or for tax cuts or some combination of the two. Read more

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Two years ago, when the New Zealand Business Roundtable merged with the New Zealand Institute to form The New Zealand Initiative, there were a fair share of people who wondered how these organisations would merge. Both were research organisations that had been headed by well-respected economists, the late Roger Kerr and David Skilling, who were perceived to come from opposite sides of the ideological spectrum. Read more

The recipe for growth is well-known. Most economists would agree that lower taxes and less regulation can encourage entrepreneurship and job creation. Read more

To understand competition, you should visit a tropical rainforest. To most visitors, rainforests, with their impressive fauna and flora, may look like places of abundance. Read more

Over the past decades, being a shareholder in Rheinisch-Westfälisches Elektrizitätswerk AG, one of Europe’s largest utility companies, was a pleasurable thing. Recessions and upswings came and went, but one thing was certain: each financial year, RWE would post a decent profit. Read more