Our current fiscal settings promise that we will eventually face a public debt explosion. A major cause would arise from the ...

With the passing of Jim Bolger, New Zealand has lost a politician defined by another era, but who helped usher in the modern ...

New Zealand has ‘Scandinavian ambitions in terms of quality of life, but a US attitude to tax’: Lara Clark.

The ACT party election manifesto will propose to introduce a Regulatory Standards Act to set a higher bar for new regulation, and test regulations against the key principles of the Regulatory ...

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* ...

A close analysis of the Treasury assessment of the Medium Term in its PREFU 2023 suggests the economy may be entering a new phase. Last week I explained that the forecasts in the just published ...

Do its Property Right Provisions Make Sense? Last week I pointed out that it is uninformed to argue that the New Zealand’s apparently poor economic performance can be traced only to poor regulations.

Is there a German word for the feeling you get when someone famous dies who created glorious, uplifting art, or music or oratory or cover drives but whom you never met but wished you had? Wished and ...

It is difficult to make sense of the Luxon Coalition Government’s economic management. This end-of-year review about the state of economic management – the state of the economy was last week – is not ...

Public policy towards tobacco consumption remains politically sensitive. In 1983, a young researcher was told by a medium-level Treasury official that Treasury policy was to abandon excise duties on ...

The proposal to organise fresh water, storm water and waste water into four entities reflects the contempt that New Zealand’s central government has for local communities. It is not the only example ...