New Zealand has had a complex process of adjusting commercial policy since the economic reforms began in 1984. This paper reports on the results of a research project to estimate the trends in industry assistance over this period and the variance of assistance within 2-digit industry groupings.

Declining water quality as a result of increased nutrient leaching is a serious and growing concern, both internationally and in New Zealand. Water pollution issues have traditionally been addressed with command-and-control type regulation, but market-based nutrient trading schemes are becoming...

This paper examines six different approaches to nutrient management, and simulates the economic costs and environmental impacts associated with them using NManager, a partial equilibrium simulation model developed by Motu and NIWA, the National Institute for Water and Atmospheric Research. We...

This chapter examines the link between firm productivity and the population composition of the areas in which firms operate. We combine annual firm-level microdata on production, covering a large proportion of the New Zealand economy, with area-level workforce characteristics obtained from...

New Zealand is the first country to implement a Greenhouse Gas Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) that includes a forestry component as part of its contribution to global climate mitigation and as a strategy for compliance with the international climate change agreement the Kyoto Protocol. The goal...

This paper uses spatial statistical techniques to examine the economic determinants of residential location patterns in Auckland in 2006. The primary empirical focus of this paper is descriptive. We seek to establish the extent to which there are identifiable population subgroups that cluster...

Private land-use decisions are critical for a broad spectrum of environmental and social outcomes, ranging from water quality and climate change to rural income distribution. I use a large dataset of the land-use decisions of New Zealand landowners to estimate a cross-sectional multinomial logit...

Motu and partners were contracted by the World Bank through its Partnership for Market Readiness (PMR) initiative to “Draft a proposal for the implementation in Chile of a Greenhouse Gas Emissions Trading System (ETS)”. The specific objective in the terms of reference is to “Propose a...

Using comprehensive, shipment-level merchandise trade data, we examine the extent to which New Zealand exporters maintain stable New Zealand dollar prices by passing on exchange rate changes to foreign customers. We find that the extent to which firms absorb exchange rate fluctuations in the...

This paper examines the incidence of involuntary job loss and its impact on the employment and earnings of affected workers, using data from the Survey of Families, Incomes and Employment (SoFIE) for the 2002–09 period. It focusses on employees who had been working in their job for at least...