Bryce is a Senior Fellow at The New Zealand Initiative and the Director of the Wellington-based economic consultancy firm Capital Economics.
Prior to setting up his consultancy in 1997, he was director, and shareholder in First NZ Capital. Before moving into investment banking in 1985, he worked in the New Zealand Treasury, reaching the position of Director.
Bryce holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Canterbury and was a Harkness Fellow at Harvard University. He is a Fellow of the Law and Economics Association of New Zealand.
Phone: +64 4 499 0790
Taxpayers commonly work hard to earn the money that governments take in taxes. Knowing the effort sacrificed they naturally want governments to spend that money wisely and well. Read more
Wellington (Tuesday, 30 August 2022) – Fiction over fact is the basis for the Ministry of Health’s (MOH) new policies, research by think tank The New Zealand Initiative reveals. The fact that neither the Government nor the MOH could produce objective data to support their claims that systemic racism is significantly to blame for poor Māori health outcomes is the most alarming revelation in the Initiative’s new report, Every life is worth the same – The case for equal treatment. Read more
An op-ed published by Dr. Bryce Wilkinson from the NZ Initiative has come out. It essentially is rebutting what many have been saying in that New Zealand’s inflation rate is a result of deliberate Reserve Bank decisions back in 2020 to save jobs and the economy at the expense of inflation. Read more
“The ownership of these [water] entities sits with local bodies and government. … Local government retains ownership. Read more
Wellington (Thursday, 18 August 2022): A Policy Note by Senior Research Fellow, Dr Bryce Wilkinson was published today by the New Zealand Initiative. It rebuts the argument that New Zealand’s inflation rate today is a result of deliberate Reserve Bank decisions in 2020 to save jobs and the economy at the expense of inflation. Read more
Last month, the Initiative published an essay listing six mistakes Graeme Wheeler and I argue the world’s major central banks widely made in responding to COVID. The New Zealand media interpreted this as an attack on the RBNZ. Read more
You load 16 tons and what do you get? You get one day older and deeper in debt. Read more
New Zealand's labour market continues to squeeze tighter, based on the latest Stats New Zealand quarterly figures. Wages rose at an annual rate of 3.4 percent, the highest seen in 14 years while unemployment remains very low - though it has risen marginally, to 3.3 percent. Read more
Wellington (Thursday, 28 July 2022): In response to criticism of the Reserve Bank’s performance over the past four years, the Prime Minister and the Minister of Finance have accused critics of applying ‘hindsight economics’. Nothing could be further from the truth. Read more
Whiplash occurs when the body is moving fast in one direction and is abruptly jerked back in the opposite direction. It can be very painful, lethal even. Read more
Since 2019, central banks have presided over perhaps the largest monetary stimulus the world has ever seen. Despite this, the surge in inflation surprised them. Read more
The Platform's Sean Plunket interviewed Bryce Wilkinson on his latest report How central bank mistakes after 2019 led to inflation. To read the report click here. Read more
The New Zealand Initiative has denounced the Reserve Bank, and other central banks for making what it says are serious mistakes which led to inflation getting out of control. The paper, released this morning, says central banks were too confident in their abilities, their policies, and their assumptions, and forgot what their core jobs were. Read more
Central banks globally have made serious monetary policy mistakes, and to restore credibility, they must acknowledge and correct those mistakes. Oliver Hartwich interviews co-authors Graeme Wheeler and Bryce Wilkinson about their new policy paper How central bank mistakes after 2019 led to inflation. Read more
A research note released today by The New Zealand Initiative mainly attributes the outbreak of inflation in many economies to central bank mistakes. Co-authored by Graeme Wheeler, former Governor of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, and Bryce Wilkinson, Senior Research Fellow at The New Zealand Initiative, the paper argues that central banks overall: were too confident about their monetary policy framework; were too confident about their models; were too confident they could control output and employment; lost their focus on price stability and took on too many mandates; faced conflicts in some cases with conflicting ‘dual mandate’ objectives; and were distracted by extraneous political objectives, such as climate change. Read more