All parties in the kiwifruit industry are seeking improved profitability, which would contribute to an increase in national income. This is the primary objective of the current industry review which is evaluating options “to maximise the profitability of those in the industry and the net benefits to New Zealand.” Read more
Last month there was a spate of commentaries marking the anniversary of the election of the Labour government in 1984 and reviewing a decade of change in New Zealand. There was overwhelming agreement that the changes were mostly for the better and that the clock would not be turned back. Read more
Unemployment is unacceptably high in New Zealand. Although it is now falling sharply, on the latest figures 8.4 percent of the reported labour force is still without employment. Read more
It is unrealistic to ask at this early stage whether the Resource Management Act has been a “success”. We still to a very large extent in transition from one regime to another. Read more
This report addresses the question of what should become of New Zealand's minimum wage law. Read more
A year ago the New Zealand Business Roundtable published the ACIL report Agricultural Marketing Regulation: Reality versus Doctrine. Since then its conclusions have been widely debated and there have been developments in each of the five major industries studied. Read more
The 93,000 kilometre roading network is one of the New Zealand’s most expensive assets. In the absence of any official estimate, informed observers put its depreciated replacement cost at around $60 billion. Read more
The authors analyse three reform proposals to the 1992 system of government: the replacement of the first-past-the-post electoral system with proportional representation, the reintroduction of a second chamber of parliament and increased use of referenda. The study assesses whether such reforms would improve the workings of government. Read more
The 1990s are destined to be a decade of profound and potentially beneficial change in the New Zealand economy. The process of structural reform is well advanced and is laying the foundations for a significant and sustained reversal of our inferior economic performance. Read more
The New Zealand experience with requiring state-owned enterprises (SOEs) to be run as successful businesses demonstrates that high quality reforms can generate enormous gains in productivity, product quality and profitability - along with lower (real) prices for consumers. Nevertheless, the gains were always likely to be limited by the difficulties involved in: * applying full commercial disciplines when state industries do not have to succeed to survive; * providing risk capital to SOEs when fiscal constraints and/or political considerations may conflict with commercial goals; * making the competitive environment genuinely neutral, when continuing government ownership brings with it the possibility of future state bail-outs; and * maintaining the early gains in the face of the political pressures to weaken the commercial disciplines which were put in place when the SOEs were first formed. Read more
This report examines New Zealand’s fiscal policy in the context of wider policies aimed at restructuring the economy in order to raise income and employment levels, and outlines the desirable directions of fiscal policy over the medium term. Read more
Fighting inflation is and should be a primary goal of the Reserve Bank. Inflation decreases the incentive to save, misallocates resources, interacts with the tax system in pernicious ways, distorts the information conveyed by market prices, increases uncertainty, and redistributes income arbitrarily. Read more
Several countries around the world, including the United Kingdom and now New Zealand, are trying to introduce elements of competition into their publicly-financed health care systems. These initiatives are constrained by the fear that moving from a predominantly public monopoly towards competitive private insurance will necessarily unleash all the evils of the United States health care system - relentless cost inflation, vast disparities in access to care and deprivation of the poor. Read more
This collection of speeches and articles is the third in a series produced by the New Zealand Business Roundtable. The material in this volume is concerned with New Zealand's economic future. Read more