Asset sales are in the papers again today: If New Zealand’s Government were a business, it would have no case to sell stakes in its energy generation firms… Sustento director and economist Raf Manji said. It was admirable for the Government to lower debt, but the numbers around selling stakes in energy firms to do […]
From Andrew Geddis: National plan to legislate to permit the ongoing “civil detention” of offenders deemed at high risk of future sexual or violent offending even after their jail sentence [is] complete. Civil detention[,] now apparently called “Public Protection Orders”… would thus be a retrospective restriction applied to some prisoners on top of the original […]
Rob Salmond has written a post claiming that New Zealand’s tax system is unfair on poor people and generally inefficient. His evidence boils down to this chart of tax rates across incomes: Rob’s an expert on tax systems so I trust that the figure is accurate, but there is so much it doesn’t say that […]
The government has decided to commission a new, privately run prison. As Eric has previously discussed, there is a fairly canonical paper on the topic by some Harvard economists, which concludes that: …a plausible theoretical case can be made against prison privatization. This case is weakened if competition for inmates can be made effective, but […]
With more and more policy being founded in economic analysis, lawyers are having to become ever more familiar with economic concepts. Competition law (antitrust to Americans) is an area that has become particularly mired in economic analysis. In New Zealand we have seen plenty of debate over large cases in which anti-competitive behaviour has been […]
Keeping up the theme of interesting empirical results as I catch up on my journal reading, here’s some research out of the US on the effect of maintaining a register of sex offenders and notifying the community where they reside. Sex offenders have become the targets of some of the most far-reaching and novel crime […]