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.

Policy reforms to primary health care delivery in New Zealand required government-funded firms overseeing care delivery to be constituted as nonprofit entities with governance shared between consumer and producers. This paper examines the consumer and producer interests in the allocation of...

This paper examines issues of the digital divide in each country and discusses similarities and differences in the policies adopted to ameliorate it. The paper presented here is subtitled 'a perspective from New Zealand' because it documents my own conclusions resulting from my position as an...

The business database is a valuable commodity. However without adequate legal protection the economic incentives required to invest in their creation ongoing updating and maintenance will be absent. The underlying objectives of many business databases can only be achieved if they are made...

Governments around the world are attempting to 'invest' in infrastructure for the perceived 'future needs' of their nations. Locally New Zealand and Australian governments have spent the past thirty years corporatising and privatising formerly government-owned incumbents and liberalising the...

Our study is based upon publicly available sources of information. Internationally published statistics have been used to supplement New Zealand data to assess New Zealand's relative position. While international studies have provided some basis for comparison the supplementary information...

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...

Bronym Howell presented A Pendulous Progression: New Zealand Telecommunications Regulations 1987-2007 at FICORA (Finnish Telecommunications Regulatory Authority) in Helsinki Finland in May 2007

Mandatory structural separation of networks from retail operations is increasingly becoming a feature of telecommunications markets - as evidenced in the 2007 legislation ultimately resulting in the separation of Chorus from Telecom's other operations and strict limitations upon the extent of...

New Zealand was the first country in the OECD to adopt a 'light-handed' approach to telecommunications regulation when in 1987 it eschewed industry-specific regulation for a generic competition law-based approach. The 'light-handed' regulatory environment prevailed throughout the 1990s during...