Eric Crampton is Chief Economist with the New Zealand Initiative.
He applies an economist’s lens to a broad range of policy areas, from devolution and housing policy to student loans and environmental policy. He served on Minister Twyford’s Urban Land Markets Research Group and on Minister Bishop’s Housing Economic Advisory Group.
Most recently, he has been looking at devolution to First Nations in Canada.
He is a regular columnist with Stuff and with Newsroom; his economic and policy commentary appears across most media outlets. He can also be found on Twitter at @ericcrampton.
Phone: +64 4 499 0790
Watch Dr Eric Crampton, Cameron Bagrie, Professor Paul Dalziel's panel session, Getting the mix right: Monetary policy, fiscal policy and the wellbeing of the nation, from the New Zealand Economics Forum 2021 held at the University of Waikato.
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Academic debates are rarely high stakes. Compared with the kind of work the Climate Change Commission is doing, debates among academics are of almost no consequence at all. Read more
Eric Crampton talks to Bryan Crump on Radio NZ Nights about urban land use planning systems and if they are fit for purpose. Eric would like to see more localised planning powers and points to a report by a UK think tank Policy Exchange called Strong Suburbs: Enabling streets to control their own development. Read more
There are calls for the Government to ease building restrictions if we want even a chance of fixing the housing crisis. The New Zealand Initiative report "The need to build - the demographic drivers of housing demand" shows population growth will require an extra 30-thousand homes per year. Read more
Urban land use planning systems that load councils with the costs of urban growth while letting councils decide whether new housing can be built are a recipe for failure. This underpins a decade of low build rates, a substantial housing shortage, and skyrocketing house prices. Read more
Daily testing for everyone involved in the border system was always ideal, though it took rather some time for the government to come around to that view. It looks like daily Covid testing will soon be part of the border regimen. Read more
New, accurate, and rapid saliva-based PCR testing for Covid-19 has started to be used in New Zealand, after being validated by the University of Illinois in 2020. The New Zealand Initiative Chief Economist, Dr Eric Crampton, and Rako Science Executive Director, Leon Grice, discuss the benefits of this test and how it makes daily testing possible for those who work at the New Zealand border. Read more
UK political commentator Jeremy Driver put his finger on something important about his country’s failure to deal sensibly with Covid. It’s something that has also been rather easy to see from half-way around the world. Read more
If you want to get into New Zealand during the pandemic, it’s not that hard. The government just needs to consider you to be a priority for a scarce managed isolation space. Read more
Suppose a tear in the spacetime continuum had delivered you a copy of December quarter 2020’s employment statistics one year early. You had received the key graphs on the employment rate, the unemployment rate, labour force participation rates and underutilisation rates for the year to come – but none of the accompanying discussion. Read more
It was always possible for a lot of cars to be built in New Zealand. It never made any particular sense, but it was within the realm of the physically possible. Read more
It’s comforting to think that necessity is the mother of invention. By that account, come the time, the inventor will rise, and problems will be solved. Read more
If land use and housing regulations prevent metropolitan areas from growing up or out as demand for housing increases, there is only one avenue of adjustment left. Prices increase. Read more
Last week’s CPI figures, showing an annual inflation rate of 1.4% in the December quarter, were accompanied by a warning from the Council of Trade Unions’ economist Craig Renney. He noted that inflation hits the poor harder than other groups. Read more
Last week, the government finally released the Simpson-Roche report detailing the failures that led to August’s Covid outbreak in Auckland. Some of the failures, like inadequate testing regimes for MIQ staff and border workers, were entirely preventable. Read more