Reports & Media

Many New Zealanders are living longer and healthier lives than at any point in history. In the last quarter century, health outcomes in New Zealand have improved across the board. Read more

We cannot vouch for the authenticity of the following conversation that mysteriously arrived in my Inbox. The sender’s name was Dante, surely a fake. Read more

Joel Hernandez and I have been lucky to be spending the past few days at the 60th Annual Conference of the New Zealand Association of Economists. The meetings are always a great way of keeping abreast of what other economists around the traps are working on. Read more

The Organisation for Economic Corporation and Development’s latest economic survey of New Zealand was published last week. I always read these surveys with a somewhat jaundiced eye. Read more

Cabinet shuffles provide great journalistic set-pieces. For the politics-as-sport contingent, it provides all the narrative arc of changes to the Black Caps line-up for the World Cup: winners and losers, who’s in and who’s out, and whether the changes will do more to help the team score political runs or to defend against the Opposition’s bowling attack. Read more

Not too long ago, Canada’s Northwest Passage was effectively unnavigable. The ice was simply too thick for sailing ships to make it through during the too-short summers. Read more

Politicians have a lot of privileges, but one privilege that regular folks have over them is the freedom to change our minds. In an interview with Meet the Press in 1970, economist Paul Samuelson explained his changing views on inflation to a journalist by saying, “Well when events change, I change my mind. Read more

If politics makes it hard to change a policy after it is announced, then testing policies before they are announced has potentially huge benefits. Testing is particularly important in climate change policy as policies vary enormously in performance, and governments have a particularly hard time in backing away from environmental policies that do not work. Read more

Coffee comes with a paradox. Night owls like me cannot simply begin to function before our restorative java, but getting the first cup takes some organising. Read more

There is too much critical tosh in the public domain these days about GDP (gross domestic product). GDP is being criticised because it does not measure wellbeing. Read more

Next week, The New Zealand Initiative will be taking a delegation of more than three dozen senior business leaders to Copenhagen. Our members want to study and experience first-hand what makes Denmark one of the world’s most successful small countries. Read more

A Radio New Zealand journalist reported in the last fortnight that other top economists privately shared Eric Crampton’s publicly expressed concerns over Treasury’s economic capability. Yesterday, Treasury’s former deputy chief economist went public on the malaise in the organisation. Read more