Reports & Media

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Zealand has been living with the prospect of a return to compulsory, sector-wide collective bargaining for nearly half a decade. Labour campaigned on its so-called ‘Fair Pay Agreement’ policy in 2017. Read more

Tune in to enough climate change events in Wellington, and you’re bound to hear someone claim that nobody living in a city needs an SUV. Leave aside for now that fuel companies must hand in carbon credits through the Emissions Trading Scheme to cover every bit of carbon dioxide coming from tailpipes. Read more