Eric Crampton is Chief Economist with the New Zealand Initiative.
He applies an economist’s lens to a broad range of policy areas, from devolution and housing policy to student loans and environmental policy. He served on Minister Twyford’s Urban Land Markets Research Group and on Minister Bishop’s Housing Economic Advisory Group.
Most recently, he has been looking at devolution to First Nations in Canada.
He is a regular columnist with Stuff and with Newsroom; his economic and policy commentary appears across most media outlets. He can also be found on Twitter at @ericcrampton.
Phone: +64 4 499 0790
This week, the government introduced legislation intended to protect youths from online harms. If the Bill passes, covered social media platforms will be required to take ‘reasonable steps’ to stop under-16s from having accounts. Platforms that do not do enough will risk large fines. Read more
Dr Eric Crampton talked to Sean Plunket on The Platform about Treasury's lack of economic expertise. Dr Crampton argued that Treasury can tell you more statistics about they're diversity than the economic education of their staff, begging the question if Treasury are achieving their purpose. Read more
Wellington (Wednesday, 19 August 2026) – The New Zealand Initiative welcomes today’s announcement that the coming urban planning system will include a competition watchdog. Hon Chris Bishop, Minister for RMA Reform, and Simon Court, Parliamentary Under-Secretary for RMA Reform, announced today that the coming Planning Bill will include an independent Urban Land Market Officer. Read more
The back of the bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label that I keep at the office has two labels. The first company-branded label appears to be designed for international markets that use the metric system. Read more
New Zealand’s Treasury has two big jobs that nobody else can do. They’re both highlighted in the first line of Treasury’s ‘Who we are’ website. Read more
Election 2023 brought us a new government committed to localist approaches. National had campaigned on greater localism as an alternative to the prior Labour government’s more centralising tendencies across water services, polytechnics, housing and farming regulation. Read more
Sometimes, a consultation process makes me wonder just how the consultation document got out the door in the first place. Submissions closed last week on the Reserve Bank’s Keeping Cash Local consultation process. Read more
Everyone knows that culture matters, at least in a vague sense. But showing how it matters has been like pinning jelly to a wall. Read more
It’s only going to get weirder from here, folks. Trump did not like existing social media platforms, so he launched his own, Truth Social, in 2022. Read more
1. INTRODUCTION AND SUMMARY 1.1 This submission on the Reserve Bank of New Zealand’s Keeping Cash Local consultation is made by The New Zealand Initiative (the Initiative), a Wellington-based think tank supported primarily by major New Zealand businesses. Read more
In this episode, Eric talks with Adam Jarvis, an Emergent Ventures fellow, about what happened when Anthropic held back the public release of its most powerful AI model, Mythos, and the US government then effectively banned non-US citizens from using the version it released instead, Fable. Adam argues that New Zealand is unusually well placed to host hyperscaler data centres, and that the binding constraint is not power or bandwidth but the country's inability to give investors a fast and certain answer. Read more
Dr Eric Crampton talked to Sean Plunket on The Platform about growing concern over data centres, arguing that much of the worry is founded on not understanding the scale of industrial water use and on misunderstanding the effects on electricity networks. Dr Crampton said a data centre proposed for Southland could take water comparable to almost two golf courses, or about a quarter of the average Canterbury irrigation consent, and he argued that fast consenting of new generation, particularly geothermal, would let data centres fund a build out of electricity that reduces overall cost rather than increasing it. Read more
Oliver asked me to make the case for the government’s resource management legislation. It should be read in conjunction with Nick Clark’s critique below. Read more
Wellington has its share of urban legends, most of them false. One of the more popular ones, and a recurring social media trope, claims that America’s Army Corps of Engineers was prepared to build a proper motorway between Wellington and Auckland after the Second World War. Read more
Dr Eric Crampton talked to Heather Du Plessis-Allan on Newstalk ZB about the government's $60 million payment to keep Golden Bay Cement's Northland plant open, which he described as a one-off that leaves the underlying problem in the Emissions Trading Scheme unresolved. Dr Crampton argued the scheme's industrial allocations are poorly designed for cement, and that setting them properly, whether by allocating credits that track how carbon intensive production is overseas or by applying a carbon border charge on imports, would remove the need for payments like this one. Read more