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The OCR leak: again/still
15 Apr 2016 Leave a comment
I’m heartily sick of the Reserve Bank leak story and hope that this is the last occasion I write about it. But there were a few further points I wanted to make, partly in response to the coverage in the last 24 hours.
I would also add that despite several commenters on various stories having correctly noted that the longstanding system vulnerabilities mean that there may have been previous leaks over the years from people in the Reserve Bank’s media or analyst lock-ups, I’m not sure it would a wise use of time or resources now (or perhaps even possible) to attempt to prove it one way or the other. But that is a matter for the Reserve Bank.
Much of the media commentary has been about the abolition of the Reserve Bank’s lock-ups. The many good trustworthy people pay the price of one peripheral player cheating. Worse, it will apparently be harder to get good…
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Tourism, services exports: more underperformance
14 Apr 2016 Leave a comment
Somewhere the other day I noticed a job advert (no, I wasn’t looking) for a role in tourism policy at MBIE. I guess one has to do a bit of a hard sell to get good policy analysts to work in such a minor area of government, but the rather over the top claims (‘high profile portfolio’, ‘make a difference to New Zealand’s economy’) irked me a bit, so I dug out a bit of data.
The World Bank has collated data on international tourist arrivals for a huge range of countries and territories. For these purposes, “tourist” includes most business visitors (anyone not visiting for a purpose directly remunerated from within the country visited). The World Bank data comes with quite a few health warnings – countries collect data in different ways, some only capture those staying in hotels for example, and I presume in the Schengen area there is…
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Equal Pay Day explained
14 Apr 2016 Leave a comment
#EqualPayDay This coupon graphically represents the statistical fairly tale that is being spread today http://t.co/xwQXCrWE4d—
Mark J. Perry (@Mark_J_Perry) April 14, 2015
The Broader View: The Positive Effects of Negative Nominal Interest Rates
11 Apr 2016 Leave a comment
By Jose Viñals, Simon Gray, and Kelly Eckhold
Version in Deutsch (German)
We support the introduction of negative policy rates by some central banks given the significant risks we see to the outlook for growth and inflation. Such bold policy action is unprecedented, and its effects over time will vary among countries. There have been negative real rates in a number of countries over time; it is negative nominal rates that are new. Our analysis takes a broad view of recent events to examine what is new, country experiences so far, the effectiveness of negative nominal rates as well as their limits and their unintended consequences. Although the experience with negative nominal interest rates is limited, we tentatively conclude that overall, they help deliver additional monetary stimulus and easier financial conditions, which support demand and price stability. Still, there are limits on how far and for how…
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US policy fails at reducing child poverty because it aims to fix the poor
11 Apr 2016 Leave a comment
If we want to help kids, it’s time to focus on money, not marriage.
[This piece was originally published by the Washington Post at Post Everything.]
From the first federal social welfare program for Civil War widows to Social Security and the 1960s War on Poverty, government support for poor families in the United States has attempted to enforce a moral hierarchy based on marriage: Widows got pensions they were considered to have earned, for example, while single mothers got shame and stigma for their moral misdeeds.
Since the 1960s, as marriage rates have fallen and women’s employment opportunities have improved, fewer and fewer women rely on husbands for their material needs. Now, the majority of children no longer depend primarily on the income of a married father. And yet, our policies to alleviate poverty still remain focused on correcting the behavior of poor people – especially their marital…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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