National Business Review

The global convergence of productivity and incomes means there are no realistic chances that lower skilled workers in developed nations will be able to move up the wealth ladder. This means they will either have to become more skilled or they will become poorer in relative terms, and possibly also in absolute terms.

Published in The National Business Review (Auckland), 23 May 2014 (PDF) Budget day last week was dominated by the usual focus on the return to surplus, some new spending pledges and discussions of potential future tax cuts. Soon afterward, however, commentators and politicians discovered the Treasury papers contained some political dynamite outside the core of fiscal […]

LGNZ’s inquiry into local government funding makes sense. It should not stop there. In fact, what would be needed is an investigation into the role of local government, coupled with the question of how a new local government finance framework could incentivise councils to go for growth and development.

Personally, I find it perplexing why any country would import the mixed member proportional electoral system from Germany. Maybe the German political landscape looked superficially stable and efficient around the time New Zealand considered alternatives to its traditional Westminster-style first-past-the-post system.

The New Zealand economy is undoubtedly in good shape but not all the factors behind the boom can or should be sustained indefinitely. This raises two questions: How much is temporary? What are the prospects once these one-off factors disappear?

Parliaments may get elected, ministers and prime ministers change, bills become law but at the end of the day we are left with the same problems we have been discussing for years, if not decades:

When we are talking about a framework to measure the success of any government policy, we should also have a framework for what constitutes good policy. For this we need some normative principles. Walter Eucken’s list, despite originating in another place and another era, may be a good starting point for such an exercise.

Can representative democracy survive the 21st century? Perhaps in order to preserve democracy, we need to make it more democratic – even if that makes it less representative.