In the past, this column has pointed to a transition in the world order, as the American hegemony weakens. It was uncertain ...

I’ll assume they don’t seriously compromise the conclusion.) The research finds that six variables explain about three-quarters of the variation between levels of happiness across countries: GDP per ...

We may regret we have not put enough effort into building resilience. I was wrong when I argued that the Muldoon Government should have hiked petrol tax to ration petrol when it ran short following ...

The turmoil in the world economy from Trump’s attack on Iran will delay New Zealand’s economic recovery. Back in 1993 I was perhaps the first to announce that the economy seemed to be in recovery. The ...

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 ...

Pragmatic analysis says maybe we should, but we should also consider nationalisation. We should certainly consider better regulation. An earlier column argued that we should make the government’s net ...

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 ...

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 ...

Why is the British Labour Government penalising its poor? We have the spectacle of the Starmer-led British Labour Government taking measures which are making some of the most struggling Brits worse ...

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 ...