While it is widely known that the destination and composition of merchandise exports have been changing over recent years, less attention has been given to the drastic changes in the tourism industry (a major form of service export). Benje Patterson discusses that here (with a link to the Infometrics article here). With these trends in […]
Matt Nolan finished his series of posts on tax by discussing “inflation tax” on interest.co.nz (Infometrics version here). The article covers a lot of ground, discussing monetary policy, “one-off” money financing, and seigniorage. These areas are all related, but all involve special elements.
Last week David Grimmond wrote (here and here): However, despite the great informational power of statistics, bear in mind that sample based statistics are still always measured with error. How often do we hear news items that note something like: ‘according to the latest political poll, the support for the Haveigotadealforyou Party has increased from […]
Following the concerns about botulism and Fonterra, there have been increasing calls for New Zealand to be “diversified” or even for the NZ government to “pick winners”. Gareth Kiernan touches on these ideas, and why we should be careful with them here. A choice quote: Although economic diversity is useful in terms of limiting the […]
I am continuing the series on tax over on Rates Blog with a piece on progressivity called “progressivity, how does that work?“. The short answer … magnets: The long answer? You’ll have to go read the post. However, I will give you this here: In today’s article we discussed progressivity, and the complicated interrelationships between […]