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Displaying: 33 - 64 of 363 items.
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OECD Report on New Zealand a Curate’s Egg
6 May 2011, Roger Kerr
The latest OECD report on New Zealand, out last week, attracted little media attention. This is unsurprising. It didn’t contain much that was original or insightful. Nevertheless, the report has political overtones.
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New Bill Best Hope for Regulatory Discipline
26 April 2011, Roger Kerr
Any doubts about the case for legislation to bring greater discipline to regulatory policy making in New Zealand should have been removed with
the release of a recent Cabinet paper dealing with the Regulatory Standards Bill that is now before parliament.
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Is 'Tax the Rich' Good Policy?
26 April 2011, Roger Kerr
The Labour Party plans to increase the top personal tax rate on higher income earners if it wins office at the November election. The last Labour-led government raised the rate from 33 to 39 cents, ostensibly to gain more revenue for social spending. As always happens, there were unintended consequences.
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Hickey Analysis On Tax Changes Wide Of The Mark
15 April 2011, Roger Kerr
In last weekend’s Herald on Sunday Bernard Hickey wrote that the tax changes announced in the May 2010 budget had failed.
“The company tax cut was supposed to encourage companies to invest here and employ more people.” Together with changes to personal tax, GST and depreciation, this “would bring down the budget deficit and transform the economy from a consuming and borrowing junkie into an investing and exporting powerhouse.”
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Productivity Growth Still New Zealand's Big Challenge
8 April 2011, Roger Kerr
The income gap between New Zealand and Australia increased from 35% in 2008 to 38% in 2010. Behind this are a 2.8 percent fall in real GDP per capita for New Zealand and a 0.3 percent rise for Australia since 2008. This deterioration should not come as a surprise.
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Where Are The Jobs For Those On Benefits?
25 March 2011, Roger Kerr
When the Welfare Working Group’s report came out last month advocating more work-focused welfare arrangements, some critics asked, “Where are the jobs for beneficiaries to go to?”
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Some Public Policy Implications of the Canterbury Earthquake
11 March 2011, Roger Kerr
The tragic events in Christchurch will have implications for the government and councils in the region for years to come. Public policies could help or hinder the recovery process.
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Privatisation Myths Need To Be Busted
7 March 2011, Roger Kerr
There are an extraordinary number of myths about privatisation, more than can be busted in a single article. It is a classic example of the Big Lie – repeat the same thing over and over again and people will believe it.
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The Real Meaning of Welfare
25 February 2011, Roger Kerr, Otago Daily Times
While Christchurch’s tragedy has pushed the Welfare Working Group’s final report onto the back-burner, it is at such a time that a well-functioning welfare system is at its most needed and important.
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Nonsense About Inequality From The Ivory Tower
11 February 2011, Roger Kerr, Otago Daily Times
I said in a recent article that, other things being equal, I prefer less income
inequality to more but that I am more concerned about poverty and
hardship. This was like a red rag to a bull to Mike O’Brien of the Social Policy and
Social Work Programme of Massey University, a long-time advocate of
welfarist and redistributionist policies.
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Poverty Not Inequality Should Be Our Main Concern
30 January 2011, Roger Kerr, Sunday Star Times
Other things being equal, I prefer less inequality in incomes and wealth rather than more. But I worry much more about poverty and hardship – in New Zealand and in poor countries.
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Opportunities and Challenges In The Year Ahead
28 January 2011, Roger Kerr
So far the government’s efforts to promote faster productivity and income growth have been modest. None compare with past changes such as
import liberalisation, the floating of the dollar or the Reserve Bank Act.
Nevertheless, in the current year and beyond there are several items on the government’s agenda that could be as significant as those earlier moves.
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Free Trade Agreements and Free Trade
14 January 2011, Roger Kerr
A very interesting and important report by the Australian Productivity Commission was released last month. Implicitly, its conclusions call into question the emphasis of New Zealand’s trade policy.
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Savings Working Group Serves Up Strange Report
10 January 2011, Roger Kerr, Otago Daily Times
The SWG is tasked with exploring the connections between national saving and fiscal policy, taxation and the future role of KiwiSaver. Yet its main focus seems to be on New Zealand’s current account deficits and external debt, and it ranges over state sector management, productivity and other extraneous issues.
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Abolition of Gift Duty Long Overdue
17 December 2010, Roger Kerr, Otago Daily Times
The wheels of bureaucracy can sure grind exceeding slow. Inertia and risk aversion on the part of bureaucrats often defeat overwhelming arguments for change.
The exercise of abolishing gift duty is a good illustration of much that is wrong with the policy advice process in Wellington.
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Investors Should Remember Caveat Emptor
17 December 2010, Roger Kerr, National Business Review
This year has been a mixed bag as far as regulation of New Zealand’s capital markets is concerned.
It began badly with the government scrambling to simplify its cumbersome and costly financial advisers legislation, which was a response to the finance company collapses.
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The Value of a CEO
3 December 2010, Roger Kerr, Otago Daily Times
Executive pay has been in the news again, with recent reports of the remuneration packages of Sir Ralph Norris, CEO of Commonwealth Bank of Australia, and George Frazis, head of Westpac New Zealand. Some claim they are unfair or undeserved.
How should we think about the high pay of some CEOs? Here’s my take. Comments welcome.
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Australia-New Zealand Income Gap 38% and Rising
29 November 2010, Roger Kerr, the Dominion Post
“Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air.”
Don Brash and members of the 2025 Taskforce could be forgiven for reflecting on these lines from Thomas Gray’s famous Elegy.
Their second high quality report released earlier this month should have sparked wide public debate, but didn’t.
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The 'Climategate' Scandal Should Not Be A Surprise
19 November 2010, Roger Kerr, Otago Daily Times
Last month I heard Professor Kealey speak at an academic conference in Australia. His topic was the ‘Climategate’ scandal at the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia. Subsequently, other global warming claims have been shown to be flawed, such as the disappearance of glaciers in the Himalayas predicted in the last IPCC report.
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Are We Misled by Economists?
12 November 2010, Wolfgang Kasper
In a recent article (Herald, 26 October), economics teacher Peter Lyons ran a valiant attack against ‘neoclassical economics’. He described this as an unrealistic ideology, which has dominated New Zealand’s political life. He is right on the first point and wrong on the second.
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Ireland: Lessons from Success and from Failure
5 November 2010, Roger Kerr, Otago Daily Times
In the wake of the global financial crisis and Ireland’s self-inflicted economic woes, some commentators have leapt to the conclusion that its apparent success in the decade and a half to around 2005 was a mirage.
They have pronounced the Celtic Tiger dead, and added insult to injury by arguing that current austerity policies will make Ireland’s predicament worse.
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More Urgency Needed on Regulatory Reform
25 October 2010, Roger Kerr, the Dominion Post
In its report last year, the 2025 Taskforce said that overseas research suggested that “as much as a third of the income gap to Australia could be closed if we were able to move New Zealand to world best practice across all the major areas of regulation”.
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Black or White: Good Cat is Mouse-Catching
22 October 2010, Roger Kerr, Otago Daily Times
There is a Sichuan proverb: “black or white – good cat is mouse-catching”. Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese leader who initiated China‘s moves away from a socialist system in the 1970s, adapted it to say that it didn’t matter whether the cat was black or white “as long as it can catch mice”.
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Should We Restrict Foreign Investment in Land?
8 October 2010, Roger Kerr, Otago Daily Times
Every few years New Zealand has a debate about land sales to foreigners. The last time was 2003: the Sunday-Star Times carried articles headlined ‘New Zealand for sale’, and ‘Land ownership strikes a nerve’. The government of the day introduced tighter rules for sales of ‘iconic’ land.
Currently a Save the Farms lobby group is calling for a fresh public debate. This is not unhealthy: foreign ownership, including in land, is an important topic. How should we think about the issues?
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The Case for Speeding Up the MMP Referendum
24 September 2010, Roger Kerr, Otago Daily Times
The select committee considering the bill to set up the referendum on the electoral system is due to report back to parliament next month.
It is important that parliament provides voters with the best possible process for deciding on this important issue.
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This Year's 2025 Taskforce Report an Important Stocktake
13 September 2010, Roger Kerr, Otago Daily Times
Achieving the goal of catching up with Australian income levels by 2025 would hugely benefit most New Zealanders and alleviate many social problems – stretched household budgets, the availability of high-paying jobs, housing affordability, resource constraints in health, education and environmental protection, and our ability to cope with an aging population.
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Hysteria About Employment Law: A 90 Day Wonder?
30 August 2010, Roger Kerr, the Dominion Post
Why are New Zealand unions so opposed to the government’s minor step of extending the current 90-day probation period for small firms to firms of all sizes? After all, a Department of Labour survey found the current rules were working well, with 40% of employers saying they were not likely to have made their last hire without the trial period.
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What’s All This About New Zealand Management?
27 August 2010, Roger Kerr, the Otago Daily Times
Last month Rebecca Macfie wrote an article in the Listener entitled “Our slack bosses”. In it she argued that “one of New Zealand’s dirtiest little secrets is that our businesses are not very well managed” and that “the poor quality of New Zealand managers is holding the country back”.
Journalist Rod Oram has made similar claims. Do they stand up to scrutiny?
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Savings Working Group a Good Initiative
26 August 2010, Roger Kerr, Stuff Business Day
The savings debate has not always been well-informed, and it’s good that the government has put together a well qualified group to advise it. Saving may encourage growth, but growth also encourages saving. And only a productive, growing economy can generate the goods and services people need in retirement; they can’t consume bank deposits.
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The Dubious Benefits of Fiscal Stimulus
13 August 2010, Roger Kerr, Otago Daily Times
John Maynard Keynes once wrote: “There is no harm in being sometimes wrong – especially if one is promptly found out.” Unfortunately for the world, the problems with Keynes’ ideas were not discovered promptly, and the lessons were too soon forgotten as Keynesian thinking enjoyed a revival with the recent global financial crisis and subsequent recession.
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New Insights on New Zealand’s Productivity Performance
30 July 2010, Roger Kerr, Otago Daily Times
In recent years Statistics NZ has done an excellent job of shedding light on the productivity performance of the economy. It made a further contribution with a release last month of productivity statistics at the industry level for the years 1978-2008.
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Council Democracy and Performance Must Be Improved
19 July 2010, Roger Kerr, The Dominion Post
The job of councils should be to provide public good services – services that can’t be provided efficiently by firms or the voluntary sector. Otherwise councils crowd out the private sector, run commercial businesses less efficiently on average, and harm economic growth.
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