Common advice to public speakers is to start with a joke. So perhaps outgoing Prime Minister Chris Hipkins was only joking when he kept saying, “We are winning the battle against inflation”. Read more

The Prime Minister has ruled out a wealth tax so long as he is leader of the Labour Party. The promise may have been driven by recent polling, but it is sound economics nevertheless. Read more

If a lot of the government’s health policy people started looking warmly at homeopathy and other kinds of medical pseudoscience and woo, we’d all recognise that as a problem, right? Maybe we would want to test our intuitions about it. Read more

If you lecture in the theatre and no student is there to hear it, did anybody learn? Welcome to teaching at universities in 2022. Read more

The monetary and fiscal policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic set the stage for the inflation we are currently experiencing. In the debate about what drives inflation and who is to blame, one important element has not received the attention it deserves: the coordination between monetary and fiscal policy. Read more

Politicians are recently pushing for a large-scale adoption of battery electric vehicles (BEV; currently <1% of vehicles in NZ) to reduce the emissions generated by the transport sector. The emissions reduction plan supports this with $1.2bn of spending, of which $569m are used for the “Clean Car Upgrade” programme. Read more

Inflation in New Zealand has been on the rise (7.3 percent last quarter) as have the attempts to explain it. The RBNZ points to strong global economic activity, supply disruptions, and the Ukraine war. Read more

The media has largely ignored economics in the last couple of years. The return of inflation, however, has brought economic topics back into people’s minds and into media coverage. Read more