Rational Economic Policy: A New Zealand Perspective

This book is a compilation of (mainly) unpublished papers I have written or co-written over 40 years in Brasilia, Ottawa, New Zealand and Paris. The papers were conference papers or reports. In this sense the book represents ‘bits and pieces’. However, they are ‘bits and pieces’ that struck a chord with some researchers at times and therefore worth making available more widely to students and researchers.

The work described here relates in a very general way to international commerce and New Zealand’s place in this world. The New Zealand economy is peculiar in the sense that it is very small, with no direct global leverage and subject to the ‘tyranny of distance’. Some of the chapters are concerned with the New Zealand agricultural sector, its prominent place in the New Zealand economy and the competition for resources it faces with other tradeable industries.

Some chapters are concerned with the competition New Zealand faces in world markets. The international agricultural markets are, Professor Anne Krueger noted, “bewilderingly complex” environments where governments and bureaucrats strive in the hope of gaining some national advantage for producers and manufacturers. The aim is to benefit consumers, of course, but the path is often a circuitous one.