The mid-term review of the WTO Doha Round of trade negotiations held recently in Cancun was concluded in a premature fashion by the hosts. Participants were not moving forward towards a process that would see the talks move towards a final agreement in 2004. This was a disappointment for New...

One of the major themes in New Zealand economic development thinking has been concerned with the balance of trade, industry and infrastructure policy that should accompany entrepreneurial activity. A new era of export development began in the early 1980’s with the introduction of a ‘more...

Very little is known about the basic income and price responsiveness of New Zealand food markets. As far as we can determine, there has never been a complete disaggregated food demand model estimated for New Zealand. In a famous article, Court (1967) estimated a demand system for three red...

Pressures for the reform of agricultural policies in wealthy countries will increase. Current policies are expensive and inefficient and impose substantial costs on countries that cannot afford to subsidize their agricultural sectors. A major political impediment to policy reform is the real or...

New Zealand import protection was been reduced from amongst the highest in the developed world in the 1980’s to about the OECD average in 1999. At that point, Government stopped further reductions that had been planned. That policy has left import protection on apparel goods (clothing and...

A great deal has been written on the subject of ‘Farming without Subsidies’ in New Zealand. This paper draws heavily on much of that work, particularly Sandry and Reynolds (1990), Meat and Wool NZ (2005), Vitalis (2005), Gould (1982), Johnson and Forbes (2000), Lattimore (1987), Rayner et al...

International trade protectionism is frequently supported on the assumption that importables provide more jobs for unskilled labour than does the exportable sector. This contention is questioned here by reference to the factor intensity of New Zealand trade. Exportables are found to be more...

The trade and wages debate worldwide, over the last decade has focused attention on the possible relationships between trade liberalisation and the factor distribution of income. In Australia real wages in manufacturing have remained about the same since 1977 while real GDP has doubled. At the...

This paper aims to highlight the continued importance to New Zealand’s economic future of having a vibrant farming sector. It argues that New Zealand policymakers cannot afford to ignore or downplay the contribution of the primary sector in favour of promoting ‘sexy’ industries such as ICT...

The relative decline in unskilled wages worldwide has prompted some commentators to place the blame on globalisation and trade liberalisation. A more likely cause in the New Zealand context is technical change that favours the employment of skilled labour. This hypothesis is tested using shift...