Bronwyn Howell and Dave Heatley's presentation at the recent Internet New Zealand Ultrafast Broadband Workshop held in Wellington on 19 May 2010.

When New Zealand's railway system was privatised in 1993 it was as one entity thus avoiding any issues arising from the 'separation of wheel and rail'. Yet this approach failed in time in that in 2003 the New Zealand Government had to come in and purchase the track in order to bail out the...

On July 1 2010 the Minister of Communications Steven Joyce announced fundamental changes to the structure and regulation of the New Zealand Government's Ultra-Fast Broadband Initiative. The changes were deemed necessary in order to achieve uptake targets sufficient to underpin the business case...

The Australian and New Zealand governments have both decided that substantial government investment is required to accelerate the deployment of new nationwide fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) networks. This paper examines the two proposals in light of the crucial role of price discrimination in enabling...

Current Comment is an occasional series providing economic commentary on topical issues. This first issue relates to penalties when the trains do not run to schedule.

The economic purpose of an Overseas Investment Act (OIA) should be to enable foreign investment that has a positive (or at least non-negative) impact on a country's economic performance and to prevent investments which will likely have detrimental net effects. An examination of both the content...

The current mobile ecosystem is best understood in terms of a monopolistic competition model characterised by heterogeneous producers providing a range of differentiated products for consumers with heterogeneous preferences. Product differentiation offers producers some market power ultimately...

This submission was prepared as a response to the Ministry of Economic Development's discussion document Regulatory Implications of Structural Separation.

Did the 2002-08 re-nationalisation of New Zealand railways represent the end of a failed experiment in the privatisation of essential infrastructure and herald the renaissance of socially-desirable environmentally-friendly rail? Or was it a misguided attempt to stem the inevitable decline of a...