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As the Government looks ahead to the end of the Covid-19 public health emergency it should first look to the past for examples of how good policy intentions in a recovery can go horribly wrong. For instance, a paper by US-based macroeconomists David and Christina Romer shows that fiscal headroom is crucial because it means countries with low-debt will experience much milder downturns after a crisis than highly leveraged countries. Read more

The Government’s wage subsidy scheme has a lot going for it. After a few early wrinkles were ironed out the evidence suggests it has achieved its purpose, helping connect more than a million New Zealand workers with their employer. Read more

Among the more irritating education fads is the idea that schools need to teach a “growth mindset”. It is true that students who think they can improve wind up faring better than those who feel stuck in a hole from which they see no way out. Read more

New Zealand has come out of lockdown to enter the purgatory of Three-dom (hopefully for only a couple of weeks). The path towards a new normal remains long and littered with challenges. Read more

When the facts of the world change, business models must change to keep up. Legislating the world back to the way it was rarely turns out well, and cobbling together regulatory and tax measures to return the media funding environment to the 1980s seems like a mistake. Read more

Last Wednesday, The New Zealand Initiative published a 13-page research report explaining why reliance on central bank credit to fund fiscal deficits is not a free lunch and it is economically dangerous to claim otherwise. The New Zealand Social Credit Association subsequently placed a full-page advertisement in the weekend’s Herald espousing the opposite position. Read more