Minister of Foreign Affairs Winston Peters was wrong to criticise Governor of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, Anna Breman, ...

New Zealand is a small, isolated nation and needs to design itself accordingly. We should avoid uncritically imitating larger nations. Among the news websites I read is a British daily which once a ...

The Minister of Finance says it is but, parochialism aside, are we doing anything to ensure it really is? One of the necessary skills of a politician is to hold on to at least two contradictory ...

We should follow the Golden Rule of Fiscal Management and not borrow for consumption in the medium run. Asymmetry is a crucial, but often ignored, feature of credit transactions. You would normally be ...

New Zealand has ‘Scandinavian ambitions in terms of quality of life, but a US attitude to tax’: Lara Clark. One of the most perceptive remarks about New Zealand’s fiscal tension was made by former ...

Do we need bigger multipurpose government mega-departments? Restructuring seems to be the fashionable management practice whenever faced with a challenge. (Eminent health economist Alan Maynard’s ...

What are the economic and political implications if the New Zealand economy stagnates for five and more years? Prime Minister Christopher Luxon told Morning Report that ‘We've got the worst recession* ...

Angus Deaton’s ‘Economics in America’ challenges the direction that economics has taken. In 2015 Angus Deaton was the sole awardee of the Bank of Sweden’s Prize in Honour of Alfred Nobel, for his ...

Winning office is not the same as achieving change. A recent Economist columnist divided politicians and their political advisers into either ‘jock wankers’ or ‘nerd wankers’. It’s a distinction which ...

We should not assume that all adopted innovations are progressive. Jonathon Haidt’s ‘The Anxious Generation’ illustrates that sometimes they require social measures to enhance well being. The Anxious ...

What can you do when you have hit your borrowing limit and still want to spend? One option is to cut back on maintenance of your capital – say, to delay repainting the house or keeping the car in ...

This column started out to explain how the proposed structural outsourcing of public surgery was partly a consequence of the peculiarities of our fiscal borrowing practices. In summary, the ...