Industrial policy is once more on the agenda of many governments. There is a long history of Industrial Policies (IP) aimed at promoting a particular sector of an economy. When Henry VIII abandoned ...

No attention is paid to what will be the future composition of economic activity. It assumes that the growth will happen and that the required businesses – critically, exports – will appear. After all ...

The tensions between different approaches to the economy are surfacing as the election nears. As we head towards next year’s election, the tensions between the coalition partners are becoming ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

While many of the world’s Christian religions seem preoccupied with personal issues that Jesus, their founder, barely touched upon, they must engage with economic issues too. Robert Prevost, chose the ...

The invitation to comment on the proposed Regulatory Standards Bill opens with Minister David Seymour stating ‘[m]ost of New Zealand's problems can be traced to poor productivity, and poor ...

Can we trust the Trump cabinet to act in the public interest? Nine of Trump’s closest advisers are billionaires. Their total net worth is in excess of $US375b ...