Reports & Media

A truism in politics has been codified in what’s been called Miles’s Law: “Where you stand depends on where you sit.” In other words, principles can depend a bit on one’s interests. Legend had it that one of the professors who taught courses in antitrust where I went to graduate school liked to quip: “I support antitrust because antitrust supports me.” Consulting in antitrust cases was rather lucrative. Read more

If we could fixing the tangled mess of regulation stymieing new home construction, it would help alleviate real misery. The housing shortage leads directly to rents that take up too much of our paycheques, to overcrowding, and potentially to poor health. Read more

All’s well that ends well. There is a temptation to sum up the resolution of the European Union’s personnel-finding troubles in such a Shakespearean way. Read more

In the next 10 years, 100,000 more children are expected to enrol in New Zealand schools. In response to this “unprecedented population growth”, the Ministry of Education established the National Education Growth Plan (NEGP) earlier this month. Read more

Lost in the government’s response to the Interim Climate Change Committee this week was the decision to put on ice its 100% renewable electricity policy to focus on other more effective measures. It is hard to overstate the significance of this decision. Read more

In late June, the Initiative took a delegation of our members to Copenhagen. For a week, more than three dozen New Zealand business leaders traveled Denmark and South Sweden. Read more

There was a line of ’80s and ’90s motivational posters, often involving pictures of cats, with quips that might help improve spirits around the workplace. One of those, from memory, read something like, “You don’t have to be crazy to work here, but it helps!” Other variants read, “You don’t have to be crazy to work here; we will train you.” None of them would pass modern sensitivity standards, and they were never really motivational or funny in the first place. Read more

New Zealand performs strongly in a number of international rankings, and not so well in others, as well covered by this publication. So when a delegation of Kiwi business leaders recently went to Denmark to see how a small country was a world leader – economically and socially – we were struck by what made the Danes so successful. Read more

Maybe things would be different if somebody had 'invented' prices. We tend not to understand and appreciate institutions, like prices, that emerge spontaneously through human interaction rather than are the product of human design. Read more