other

A Motorcycling Perspective of Australia - Part II
Outback Australia is sparcely populated, but a production powerhouse despite containing the remnants of humanity....
27 October 2004 - Gareth Morgan

Australia from the Road
The road is the vein of an economy. Travelling it offers an insight into the life of others....
21 October 2004 - Gareth Morgan

Did you spot the downturn?
The slowdown here will hardly be noticed, thank a strong world economy....
8 April 2004 - Gareth Morgan

Guerillas in the Mist
Some economies carry on regardless as war rages around them and as their governments disintegrate. This is testimony to the necessity of markets and their resilience when all around the State apparatus becomes dysfunctional....
26 February 2004 - Gareth Morgan

Housing - The Old Favourite Keeps on Delivering
House prices are racing. We expect that to continue for at least another 12 months....
20 November 2002 - Gareth Morgan

The Forty Year Slide
The 1990's may have been celebrated in the States as a great growth decade but it did not surpass the 1960's golden era. In New Zealand '90's growth was merely half as strong as its '60's golden years and our productivity record has been abysmal - even by our own lacklustre history. That productivity dive has been a driver of misery en masse. The...
1 May 2000 - Gareth Morgan

A software revolution
When will we wake up to the fact that our businesses are being seriously ripped-off by bloated software that adds costs and complexity? Businesses should worry far more about the lack of return they get from their software than hiccups from the millennium bug. The Y2K problem is a useful distraction for software providers whose wares are so fragile that users spend...
14 October 1998 - Andrew Gawith

Source code please!
Modern computer operating systems and applications are a great idea. They put enough space between you and the ones and zeroes to make using a computer a practical proposition. The problem is that when there is a bug in the software, you usually can't fix it yourself. And in most cases the software developer doesn't guarantee that they will fix it either....
8 July 1998 - Tony Booth

What Value Statistics?
When economists and policy analysts plan for the future, they need to make specific assumptions about the future. To do this well, they need good information about what is happening now. Statistics are what they use to quantify this. If statistics are not available, then analysis and planning will be less optimal and the resulting inefficient allocation of resources will carry a cost for the ...
16 July 1997 - Tony Booth

Measurement Problems
Keeping track of the economy and deciphering it in order to make sensible policy settings requires statistics that accurately reflect what’s going on, Extensive economic restructuring, new firms and products entering markets and accelerating technological change have strained conventional techniques for measuring areas such as inflation and productivity The steady shift in economic activity ...
15 June 1996 - Andrew Gawith

Working the Percentages
Statistics are the measure of all things economic. The pulse of the economy is not measured in beats per minute, but in percent per month, per quarter or per year. All those hundredths are compared with all the other hundredths looking for turning points, inflexion points or any point at all. An apc is the most familiar reading of all, the percentage change from the equivalent period in the ...
8 November 1995 - Phillip Wrigley

Overcooking The Figures
I’m a wage earner with a mortgage and interest rates rise. That rise drops the spending power of my income since interest is one of the costs is face. My sister’s a wage earner without a mortgage but with savings in the bank. When interest rates rise she’s better off. Statistics New Zealand (SNZ) publish a real wage index and argue that when interest rates rise the purchasing power of ...
5 April 1995 - Gareth Morgan

The Discomfort of a Growing Economy
The prospect of a sustained period of strong economic growth, is one facing New Zealanders. While such a scenario might appear more comfortable than the alternative of scratching a living in an economy incapable of maintaining growth rates of any significance, this is a misconception. Economic growth is achieved because of discomfort, it doesn’t painlessly appear in order to provide ...
27 July 1994 - Gareth Morgan