goonix

Private prisons: National’s policy and “the proper scope of government”

/11 Comments/in , , , , /by

Today National released their corrections policy, which would allow the private sector to tender for the management of prisons.

Although not a completely ‘new’ concept for New Zealand (Auckland Central Remand Prison was privately run under the last National Government) it nonetheless raises the issue of when is it appropriate for such services to be ‘contracted out’ rather than provided ‘in-house’ by the government.

Hart, Schleifer and Vishny’s “The Proper Scope of Government: Theory and Application to Prisons” asks the question when should a government provide a service in-house, and when should it contract out provision? (Anyone interested in the full article may be able to locate it here).

The authors’ develop a model for asset ownership (in this instance a prison), which can be owned by the private sector, who contract back to the government, or alternatively can be owned outright by the government.

The central finding of the paper is that the private sector has relatively stronger, but seemingly contradictory, incentives to both reduce costs (driven by a profit motive, which comes at the expense of quality) and increase quality (to get a higher price from the government, who is an ongoing buyer of the service). In this instance the quality of a prison entails order in the prison, amenities that prisoners receive and rehabilitation.
Read more

Matt Nolan

A second recession?

/1 Comment/in /by

Or so say economists at Infometrics (a organisation I am involved with 😛 ).

Why should we expect another recession over the first half of 2009 – especially when we are coming out of a drought!

Well one justification could be that households are highly indebted, and the price of that debt is going up – so now households will want to pay some of it off.  When households are paying off debt they can’t consume – a factor that will reduce economic activity.

Discuss 😛

Matt Nolan

Providing a “capital injection” for households?

/31 Comments/in /by

It appears that National intends to do just that following this election – providing grants to individuals who lose there job beyond the unemployment benefit, but only for “during the recession”, and only “needs based”.

This is probably one of the most ridiculous ways anyone could try to deal with the current recession – although I guess increasing taxes, slashing spending (especially on the supply side), and then hiding it under the PM’s pillow would we a little sillier.

Lets think about this grant a little – what is National trying to say?  Do they think the unemployment benefit is too low?  That is supported by this quote:

The support plan was designed to help them remain confident and carry them over until they got another job.

If so, why don’t they just increase it, instead of fluffing around with “grant schemes”.  Or do they believe that unemployed people will be worse off during the recession than not in the recession – because that doesn’t make much sense to me.  I thought the cost to households in the recession stemmed from unemployment and lower real wages – being “unemployed” is just as bad in any state.

If National actually wants unemployment benefits to be partially time limited – then introduce that scheme, instead of some fluffing grant. Either they are introducing that policy, or they are trying (unsuccesfully) to sound like they are dealing with the financial crisis.

Overall, what the hell are the parties doing – is any party actually going to try to do what is best for the country in the face of this external shock … didn’t think so 🙁

Matt Nolan

Liverpool 1 Chelsea 0

/7 Comments/in /by

This is the year!

Matt Nolan

Quote: 5) Lionel Robbins – definition of economics

/22 Comments/in /by

Lionel Robbins (*):

Economics is a science which studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses

This is the fundamental definition of economics that I adher to when I write here. In all honesty this is not the sole definition of what people “see” economics as – however, it THE definition of what I would term “economic science”.

This definition fits neatly with the theoretical and applied versions of micoeconomics – however, without appropriate “microfoundations” it is hard to decide whether marcroeconomics sticks to this definition of what economics is – is macroeconomics raising the TRUE trade-off between scarce resources in the entire economy?

Ultimately, Milton Friedman felt we make macroeconomics consistent with this view (and useful) bu focusing on predictive accuracy – like many economic models, this made sense once you converged to your result, but not out of equilibrium 😛

Matt Nolan

Quote: 4) Kevin D Hoover – Is the representitive agent model really “micro-foundations”

/in /by

Kevin D Hoover:

The claim that representative-agent models provide micro-foundations succeeds only when we steadfastly avoid the fact that reporesentative-agent models are just as aggregative as old-fashioned Keynesian macroeconometric models

Kevin Hoover is a professor at Duke University.  I put down this quote as I believe that the modern day process of macroeconomics is likely to come under scrutiny following recent global events – and Dr Hoover’s writing has convinced me that the representative agent model isn’t really the same as reductionism/micro-foundations.

Microeconomics is beautiful descriptive discipline, macroeconomics needs to either find ways to apply it, or use a different holistic method to explain what it is doing – doing something that is (possibly) half and half might not cut it in the end.