Another blast from the past

Statistics NZ's Twitter feed just posted this fun item:

It has a link back to a piece that Stats published in 2012, 'Delving into the clothes basket - tracking women's and men's clothing in the CPI', which went back to 1924 to look at what men and women and children wore.

It's fascinating - today's girls will be pleased that they don't have to wear the woollen bloomers of 90 years ago, and today's women will be pleased they don't have to make their own clothes - and it's one of a terrific series of time capsules that Stats have unearthed and published. Last time I wrote about them, in 'The way we live now', I said that this analysis of past CPIs was "almost a complete social history in itself". It's also a great timewaster, so cancel an hour, head to my post, and follow up the links there to the various Stats publications.

For me - and here I stress this is my take, not Stats' view or interpretation - the clothes basket piece fortuitously showed the potential benefits of trade liberalisation. From the late '80s onwards, tariffs and quotas on clothing imports were lowered or abolished. The results were that clothes prices have risen much more slowly than prices more generally (as the first graph below shows) and people have been able to buy much more (as the second one shows).

And the "cost"? - "the number of jobs filled by paid employees in the clothing and knitted product manufacturing industry fell nearly 60 percent – from 9,550 to 4,120". Four million people, give or take, got a large benefit, while 5,500 people, give or take, lost their jobs. And I put "cost" in apostrophes because many - maybe all - of those people will have found other jobs, and in activities that the community values more highly than keeping a small-scale rag trade going.

It's also very likely that liberalising clothing imports was a progressive move (in the tax policy sense of "progressive" as opposed to "regressive"). At home, the household budgets of lower and middle income families, and particularly those with children, will have had one of their bigger costs reduced. And overseas, people in poorer countries will have got real jobs, instead of aid, and started down the road of economic development that will make them better off and, along the way, better customers for our exports. That's a pretty good outcome all round.