New Zealand is acknowledged widely as the first country to implement a formal monetary policy agreement specifying an explicit inflation target. This agreement, signed in March 1990 between the Minister of Finance and the Governor of the Bank, was implemented under Section 9 of the Reserve Bank...

In March 2009, Business and Economic Research Limited ("BERL") published “Costs of Harmful Alcohol and Other Drug Use,” a report jointly commissioned by the Ministry of Health and ACC. BERL was asked to measure the costs of drug and alcohol abuse to New Zealand society, but not to evaluate...

We review methods and assess the policy influence of a series of publiclyfunded Cost of Illness studies, mostly published since 1990. Our analysis shows that headline cost estimates, including the influential paper by Collins and Lapsley (2008), depend on an incorrect procedure for incorporating...

This paper offers new insights into Beveridge curve analysis by modelling the vacancy-unemployment rate relationship within a Markov regime-switching environment in which the probability of curve-shifting is determined endogenously by shift factors. Shift factor candidates include structural...

Data on the flow of workers moving between employment, unemployment and non-participation provide some of the most interesting and useful insights into labour market outcomes. These insights include information on the number and probability of workers moving between labour market states from,...

This paper analyses the direct and subsequent flow-on expenditure resulting from the week-long National Masters Hockey Tournament held in Hamilton, New Zealand in March 2009. During the tournament, information was collected on the expenditure from a sample of participating players and officials...

WNew Zealand’s population is ageing rapidly and alongside this the labour force is also ageing. This paper presents a descriptive analysis of the labour force and employment trends among older New Zealanders (that is, those aged 55 and over). Specifically, the paper focuses on labour force...

During December 2007 and January 2008, telephone surveys were used to randomly sample Waikato, New Zealand residents. The purpose of the surveys was to determine whether respondents valued native bird conservation programmes in their area. We elicited the contingent valuation approach to...

Under “tenure review,” the ongoing privatization of South Island Crown pastoral leases, a pastoral lessee surrenders part of his leasehold, and acquires a freehold interest in the remainder. In order to determine whether the Crown sold the right to freehold too cheaply, we model the...

Non-market valuation (NMV) is recognized as an essential tool in policy decision making worldwide. In this paper, we investigate the history of NMV, specifically in relation to New Zealand (NZ), by compiling and analyzing all available published studies. Results show a significant increase in...