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
If next week’s American Presidential election is a coin toss, that coin looks increasingly weighted toward Trump. In early October, the race was much closer to a fair coin toss. Read more
1. Introduction and Summary 1.1 This submission is made by The New Zealand Initiative (the Initiative) in response to the Government's consultation document "Have your say on Work Health and Safety," released in June 2024. Read more
Paul Brennan talks to Dr Eric Crampton on Reality Check Radio about New Zealand’s alarming drop in birth rates, and why we ranked dead last in infrastructure delivery in a global survey. Listen below. Read more
On Tuesday, Ngāi Tahu set a compelling vision of tino rangatiratanga centred on economic self-determination. The late Māori King Arikinui Tuheitia asked iwi and hapū to hold four hui to build ‘kotahitanga’ – unity. Read more
In this episode, Dr Eric Crampton and Prof Steven Hamilton explore why New Zealand and Australia's COVID responses shared similar successes and failures despite their different paths. Their conversation draws from Prof Hamilton's new book "Australia's Pandemic Exceptionalism: How we crushed the curve but lost the race," examining how both countries excelled at initial elimination and wage subsidies but stumbled with testing regulations and vaccine procurement, ultimately revealing important lessons about institutional capacity and adaptable policy responses for future pandemics. Read more
If you haven’t yet read Aaron Smale’s series on abuse in care, you really should. New Zealand doesn’t have a Pulitzer Prize for investigative journalism, but the series would rightly be up for nomination. Read more
Fertility rates have been dropping for a very long time, but the recent plunge is precipitous. Neil Johnson, Professor of Obstetrics & Gynaecology at Flinders University, took us through the numbers at a panel session for Fertility Counts Aotearoa at Parliament last week. Read more
BusinessDesk’s Pattrick Smellie had the best synopsis of New Zealand First’s announcement on foreign direct investment this weekend: “it was less important for what it said than for the fact that Peters said it.” The Overseas Investment Act has placed New Zealand among the developed world’s least hospitable climates for foreign investment. Other countries recognise investment as a benefit to be sought. Read more
I am kicking myself that we at the Initiative had not read Federated Farmers’ submission to the Banking inquiry before drafting our own. Their submission exhibits a creativity that I had thought New Zealand had lost decades ago – sometime around 1987, if we had to pin a date on it. Read more
On Newstalk ZB, Mike Hosking discussed Dr Eric Crampton's latest Newsroom column about proposed legislation in New Zealand that would force mediation between big tech companies and local media, potentially leading to financial compensation for news content. The column highlights Google's threat to drop services in response, and references similar experiences in Canada, suggesting the legislation may not achieve its intended goals and could have negative consequences. Read more
Dr Eric Crampton talked to Sean Plunket on The Platform discussing the challenges facing New Zealand's media landscape, including TVNZ's financial woes and Google's threat to stop linking to local news sites in response to proposed legislation. He expresses concern about the potential impact on public access to information and civic knowledge, while also noting that democracy has continued to function despite recent changes in the media sector. Read more
New Zealand moves inexorably from the ‘faff around’ to the ‘find out’ phase of the Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill process. On Friday, Google’s New Zealand blog noted that if the bill becomes law, Google would be “forced to stop linking to news content on Google Search, Google News, or Discover surfaces in New Zealand and discontinue our current commercial agreements and ecosystem support with New Zealand news publishers.” Google described the Bill as setting a ‘link tax’. Read more
They say you can’t beat Wellington on a good day but in one important respect, ‘they’ are wrong. Christchurch will have Wellington beat, hands-down, unless Christchurch Council manages to screw this up. Read more
Every three years, Inland Revenue undertakes a long-term insights briefing on the tax system. This year’s could spark a shift away from tedious and fruitless discussions of Capital Gains Taxes. Read more
Policies and regulations, most of the time, are a bit of a mess. Even if policies made sense when first conceived, sludge accumulates over time. Read more