Economic policy

After New Zealand’s economy overheated due to extensive fiscal and monetary stimulus, the Reserve Bank faces the challenge of controlling inflation. To stabilise the economy, it is crucial to focus on bolstering the supply side through FDI, resource management reform, immigration, licensing changes, tax-sharing, and bureaucracy reduction.

New Zealand has crippled its labour market. Only economic illiterates would celebrate this disaster as full employment.

This country can once again become prosperous and productive. But only if this is a shared ambition. As the government’s lead economic adviser, it is the Treasury’s ambition to see this through. And as Minister of Finance, it should be yours too.

The world economy is undergoing fundamental shifts – and these transformations could dwarf the things we fret about.

When you are in a hole, stop drilling. That must have been the Government’s motivation for stopping oil and gas exploration.

Have the responses to the Global Financial Crisis just shifted us towards another bubble economy?

There is no doubt there will be jobs in the future. But they will be different from our jobs today.

Someone still needs to design, service and repair those robots and drones that bring our pizzas.

We, therefore, believe that any future Chancellor should learn from Mr Brown’s experience and begin his stewardship of the economy with a step that matches Gordon Brown’s courage in giving independence to the Bank of England. This is why we suggest sourcing out both the stewardship of the fiscal rules and the Treasury’s economic forecasting activities to an independent Fiscal Policy Committee (FPC), to be modelled on the MPC. In fact, we think that this is the first policy decision that Gordon Brown’s successor should make.