The notion of ‘market failure’ used here is a bit naive. No market works perfectly so every market fails to meet the benchmark of the ideal. Taken superficially, the IMF argument that IP can be ...

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 ...

Since US president Donald Trump was elected for a second term, New Zealand has taken a ‘Homer in the Hedge’ approach to its foreign policy in relation to America. Like the famous meme from The ...

This is a column about MAGA – Make America Great Again. But as a prequel I scroll back sixty years to when I was teaching in England. I have fond memories of the students – bright and personable as ...

In this column I use the less familiar measure of GDP per capita instead of the GDP measure favoured by the commentariat. I became familiar with it when I began doing international comparisons because ...

Does the Autumn 2024 British budget point to a change in fiscal strategies? Many countries found their fiscal position was unsustainable, following the 2008 Global Financial Crash. Their public ...

Evergrande and Country Garden – two giant Chinese property development companies – are a portent of the turbulence before us. The recent financial failures of two ginormous Chinese property companies, ...

Following the Richardson/Shipley 1990 ‘redesign of the welfare state’ – which eliminated the universal Family Benefit and doubled the rate of child poverty – various income supplements for families ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...