A physician’s memoir describing a successful research program leads to pondering about research funding strategies. (The picture shows Eric Espiner with present and former colleagues celebrating his ...

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 ...

Why is the British Labour Government penalising its poor? We have the spectacle of the Starmer-led British Labour Government taking measures which are making some of the most struggling Brits worse ...

The untimely passing of Act’s candidate for the Port Waikato electorate throws an unexpected spanner into the 2023 election machinery. Maybe it’s time to think about how the law responds to such ...

Do its Property Right Provisions Make Sense? Last week I pointed out that it is uninformed to argue that the New Zealand’s apparently poor economic performance can be traced only to poor regulations.

For some it’s just a passing news headline. But when your musical hero dies it can cut deep and bring back all sorts of memories. Such it was with the tragic death of singer-songwriter Andrew Brough ...

Do we treat the government finances with the common sense that household’s manage theirs? It is a commonly held view that we should treat the government as if it is a prudent household. We don’t when ...

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 ...

The picture the commentariat presents of Winston Peters is a misleading caricature. If we don’t try to understand the complexity of the man, we cannot understand what is going on in New Zealand ...

The recent reduction in the US credit rating signals that market lenders are not happy with the US fiscal arrangements. New Zealand’s lower rating is a warning that we could do better too. Fitch ...

Legitimate pressures on government spending suggest we are going to have to raise total tax revenue or suffer a poorer quality New Zealand.

A Rogernome Defends the Policies. One of the difficulties in making sense of what happened during the Rogernomics Stagnation from 1985 to 1993 is that professional economists sympathetic to its ...