Reports & Media

Just before 3 o’clock on a Sunday afternoon, about a dozen NZTA and Ministry of Transport officials received a weekend-ruining email. Subject: “Cabinet paper: Urgent”. Read more

This month, Central Banking, the journal for the world’s monetary policy experts, hosted its virtual Summers Meetings. With inflation returning, the onset of a new European debt crisis, and the implications of geopolitical conflicts, central bankers have enough reasons to be worried right now. Read more

On 4 June, The Dominion Post published a lengthy and disturbing article highlighting the woes and dilemmas of earthquake safety regulation in Wellington. It highlighted the arbitrariness of current building standards and decisions. Read more

Pick your favourite bit of bad economic news. How about a 10 percent hike in food prices? Read more

On 31 July 2022, New Zealand's borders will fully reopen. This will be a welcome development for education providers, especially those in the tertiary sector. Read more

The moderate increases in the European Central Bank’s interest rates are far from being brutal but the writing is on the wall that Europe’s monetary party is about to end, and Southern Europe has remarkable parallels to Mexico and Latin America in the 1980s. Of all the places in history, Mexico in 1982 could give us a hint about the future of European monetary policy. Read more

A race-neutral approach to government health (and welfare) spending would give the same treatment to people in the same circumstances. It would ignore irrelevant matters such as race, ethnicity, religion, gender, or creed. Read more

Our education system is becoming a bit like a gym in which people use robots to pump iron for them. The trend began in the 1980s when hand-held calculators became cheap. Read more

A lot of problems have no good solutions – just ones that are bad in different ways. Pricing greenhouse gas emissions in agriculture is important, and every way of doing it is going to have problems. This week, the agricultural sector put up its proposed solution. Read more