Existing methodologies for estimating a government’s structural budget balance are reviewed and applied to the case of New Zealand. Besides the conventional cyclical adjustment, an assessment is made of other possible non-structural elements to the budgetary position, including the terms of...

This paper investigates the macroeconomic effects of fiscal policy in New Zealand using a structural Vector Autoregression (SVAR) model. The model is the five-variable structural vector autoregression (SVAR) framework proposed by Blanchard and Perotti (2005), further augmented to allow for the...

This working paper provides further detail on the modelling behind Challenges and Choices – New Zealand’s Long-Term Fiscal Statement, published on 29 October 2009. Building on the first Statement of 2006, we construct two main fiscal scenarios over a 40- year horizon. The historic trends...

The paper discusses the management of the New Zealand Crown’s exposure to financial risk. It argues that the Crown’s aggregate exposure to risk can be effectively managed only centrally, and that, despite the difficulties of measuring risk and specifying an appropriate objective, the...