The Treasury is the New Zealand government's lead advisor on economic and financial issues. Part of this advice consists of providing the government with forecasts of economic and fiscal variables. Economic forecasts are important, not only as a basis for forecasts of tax revenue, but also in...

This paper seeks to quantify how the welfare of different types of household changed between 2006/07 and 2009/10; a period which included the 2008/09 recession. We use three measures of household welfare: income, expenditure and the equivalent variation metric. The equivalent variation is a...

This paper has two main aims. First, the poor targeting of a policy of zero-rating food in a goods and services tax (GST) is illustrated in a simple model where the revenue lost from zero-rating food is instead devoted to a universal transfer payment, with a larger effect on progressivity....