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A funny thing happened in the last round of American minimum wage increases. The number of people in unpaid internships went up. Read more
Wellington (4 April 2016): Health Minister Jonathan Coleman is right to be sceptical about sugar and soda taxes, says The New Zealand Initiative. “While a handful of countries have tried sugar taxes, evidence that they will work is not as convincing as public health experts suggest,” says policy analyst Jenesa Jeram. Read more
Wellington (1 April 2016): Amid calls from politicians and civil society to lift the refugee quota, The New Zealand Initiative is urging government to take note of Canada’s system that allows private groups to sponsor refugees. In New Zealand, the government explicitly limits the number of refugees that are allowed into the country each year, reflecting in part the direct costs of the process that are borne by the state. Read more
It is hard to put a number on some things – like how many refugees the government should admit. If you asked how many software engineers the government should let into the country per year, I would have a hard time coming up with an answer. Read more
Is it time to stop measuring poverty, Jenesa Jeram asks. Whenever commentators get stuck debating the numbers on poverty, there are inevitably calls to stop the academic pontificating and "just do something''. Read more
Have I really been wrong about gangs all this time? I’d thought their main line of work was almost legitimate. Read more
Why is it so hard for people to agree on poverty? Despite a wealth of evidence, statistics and measurements of social indicators, there is still widespread disagreement about what poverty means in New Zealand. Read more
Recently we heard that government agencies are fudging the numbers to make themselves look better. Or as The Salvation Army's latest State of the Nation report argues, government statistics can be tweaked and manipulated to illustrate favourable results. Read more
Poverty may be one of the most reported about and argued about topics in New Zealand. It also might be one of the most poorly understood topics. Read more
Wellington (25 February 2016): New Zealand’s abundant poverty statistics should not be reduced to a single headline-grabbing number, a new report from The New Zealand Initiative argues. Poorly Understood: The state of poverty in New Zealand shows that poverty is a complex and multi-faceted issue and choosing attention-getting figures too often oversimplifies what is a very real problem. Read more