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I don’t know if anyone ever really believed manufacturing televisions in New Zealand made sense. Controls in place until New Zealand’s reforms prohibited importing fully assembled televisions, to encourage manufacture and assembly in New Zealand. Read more

Suppose I told you that anticompetitive activity right here in New Zealand was behind a transfer of wealth amounting to, at the very least, hundreds of billions of dollars. The victims of the cartel are New Zealand’s poorest, who have had to endure hardship so substantial that its effects are directly visible in New Zealand’s poverty and material deprivation statistics. Read more

Despite all your predictions to the contrary, the children still have not colluded against me. On finding out that the Crampton household’s way of divvying up the chores is somewhat nonstandard, I reported on it in a May 2018 Insights column in case others might find it helpful. Read more

“Our goal is to make sure the fight against poverty is based on scientific evidence,” Esther Duflo said shortly after becoming the second woman (and also the youngest economist, at 46) to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics. Duflo, along with her husband, Abhijit Banerjee, and Michael Kremer, received this year’s top economics award “for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty”. Read more

Imagine, for a moment, the government were about to pass a Zero Carbon bill that takes the most direct path to success on our emissions targets. What would it look like? Read more

If your doctor thinks you may be suffering from a serious illness but the test results suggest you are in the clear, that will seem like good news. But your prognosis will depend on whether your doctor has tested for the right thing. Read more

A common saying about the various stages of social acceptance is: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, and then you win." A decade after Bitcoin was born, cryptocurrencies are about to enter the "fight" phase in their quest to become a mainstream means of payment. That is all due to Libra, a new global digital currency that a Facebook-led coalition plans to launch as early as next year. Read more

From cowry shells to metal coins, promissory notes, paper money and plastic, humans have adapted to different currency types over the millennia. Then the first Bitcoin was issued on 3 January 2009. Read more

Rabobank recently reported farmer confidence had plummeted in the September quarter. Some 41% of surveyed farmers expected the rural economy to worsen next year. Read more