There is no such thing as truthThere are only stories. And everyone has their own version. For example, when talking about why the sun rises, over the ages there have been many many different stories people believed to be true.The Greeks and the Aztecs thought the sun to be a…
Nursing Pay Demands Are Bad News for Graduates
New Zealand nurses want more money, or purely and simply, they will strike (http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/national/360103/nurses-want-more-money-or-strike-to-go-ahead). More money is the only thing that will stop a planned nurses strike from going ahead. In an economy with 1.1% annual inflation, and annual national wage inflation at 1.8%, the nurses union has rejected a 9%…
International Transmission Mechanism and Tourism
I’ve started a new job! I’m now a Principal Analyst within the Sector Performance team within the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE). What a rush! This has been my third week and I feel like I’m starting to get my feet under the table and hang of the…
Thinking about Regions: Updated with R Code
Regional Industry Employment The blogs have been slow this month – sorry people. Things have been quite busy in my neck of the woods. One of the things I am looking at at the moment though are three employment related questions based on Statistics New Zealand’s Business Demographics data: What…
Craft Beer Explosion in a Mature Dull Beer Market
Regular readers of New Zealand economic blogs don’t have to go very far to be convinced of the attraction between Economists and beer, as the number of post on Eric Crampton and Seamus Hogan’s blog Offsetting Behaviour website can attest. Besides the obvious, what makes beer so interesting is the extraordinary proliferation of…
Real Markets and Money Markets
Last year, well before the US presidential election, I was in a bar having a heated conversation with some guy who had been listening to too much Tea Party rhetoric, although he wasn’t aware of its origins at the time. From points 20, 21, 31, 32 cited in that link, part…
Unemployment and the Business Cycle
There’s been a lot of recent discussion about Statistics New Zealand’s latest Household Labour Force Statistics (HLFS) which are used to define ‘the’ unemployment rate. Quite correctly, there has been an outcry over how the unemployment rate is the highest its been in 13 years, mainly from a decrease in…
Capital Markets and Economic Regulation
Tim Brown’s, head of Infratil’s “Capital Markets and Economic Regulation” area, thought provoking article in the Dominion Post’s 24 October 2012 got me thinking about economic investment. Tim’s thesis was New Zealand companies reinvest too little of their current profit, to the detriment of theirs – and ultimately New Zealand’s…
Television and Duopoly Economics
I love duopolies: two or more companies fighting it out in an economic arena. There’s a couple of different models out there to describe the outcome of duopoly behaviour.One theory (Cournot duopolies) says that the companies will fight it out, matching business models and competing until both or all are “the same”. At the end of the day, each…