Competition and the coalition of chaos

Sounds like a Harry Potter movie doesn't it, and I couldn't resist using it as a title even though, for all the critical "coalition of chaos" knocking, there's actually a fair degree of overlap of policy ambition among the coalition troika, at least when it comes to the regulation and competition issues you and I are interested in.

To save you having to read them, I've worked my way through the two coalition agreements, National/NZ First and National/ACT, and picked out where competition and economic regulation might be up for a rethink under the new government. There's the odd regulatory thing I don't know about (for example, both ACT and NZ First want to junk the Therapeutic Products Act 2023, whatever that is) but otherwise this is a reasonably complete listing of what's likely to be in play. It's possible that some of the ideas in National's 100 point economic plan might yet see the light of day, too, so I've covered that as well.

I've included some personal comments: your opinion may vary.

One thing that commentators on the coalition agreement haven't picked up on is that in the 'Preamble' to both coalition agreements there's a reference to "introducing more choice and competition into social service provision". In practical terms the main immediate outcome is likely to be in education - the ACT agreement features "Reintroduce partnership schools and introduce a policy to allow state schools to become partnership schools" and "Explore further options to increase school choice and expand access to integrated and independent schools including reviewing the independent school funding formula to reflect student numbers" - but as a wider pro-competitive principle it's a good policy stance to start with. Monopoly public sector 'take it or leave it' provision is unlikely to be the best option of meeting everyone's needs. Cushy private sector incumbency doesn't work too well either, of course: while I can't see that it's made it into any of the coalition's priority lists, I quite liked National's proposal (number 47 in its 100 point plan) to "Allow KiwiSavers to invest in more than one provider, driving innovation, boosting competition and putting downward pressure on fees".

Stepping through the NZ First agreement:

"Establish a select committee inquiry into banking competition with broad and deep criteria to focus on competitiveness, customer services, and profitability" - I'm not hugely impressed by this, partly because the Commerce Commission is already part-way through its personal banking services market study and I can't see the point of duplication (accepting that the Commission's terms of reference may have been a bit narrow in the first place), but also because I don't think a select committee is the right forum. There's too much opportunity for grandstanding and for ritual oppositionism, while select committees are overwhelmed as it is and I don't see them being resourced well enough to handle a project of this size. Better options would be to either expand the Commission's market study or go the royal commission route: the Aussies made a lot of progress with their 'Hayne Commission'. But in any event bank CEOs and their teams and advisers can expect to be facing the third degree in some forum or other in coming months.

"Explore options to strengthen the powers of the Grocery Commissioner, to improve competitiveness, and to address the lack of a third entrant to remove the market power of a duopoly" - why not, especially in the area of supplier (i.e. grocery manufacturer) conduct. As the Grocery Commissioner recently said, "We are aware that a number of influential suppliers appear to be opting out of the RGRs’ [supermarkets'] wholesale offers and insisting on supplying direct to smaller retailers but at much higher prices, which is having a negative impact on retail competition". Whether the nuclear option of forced divestment to create the launching pad for a third entrant is on the table, who knows.

"Assess and respond to the impact that energy prices have on inflation including consumer led institutional improvements" - no, I don't know what that means, either, and it could be as innocuous as easier ways to switch suppliers to apply stronger competitive pressure (it works, as I experienced myself), or something along the 'New Reg' arrangement Australia has experimented with (described here), but it could also hint at a greater interest in control of retail prices.

"Investigate the threshold at which local lines companies can invest in generation assets" - my days of looking at requests for cross-sector involvements under the Electricity Industry Reform Act are long past, but insofar as I remember any of it, why not.

"Require the electricity regulator to implement regulations such that there is sufficient electricity infrastructure to ensure security of supply and avoid excessive prices" - seems reasonable, especially with the looming challenge of provisioning electric vehicles.

"Examine transmission and connection pricing to facilitate cost effective connection of new renewable generation resources, both on-shore and off-shore" - can't argue with that either, while hoping that it doesn't degenerate into the usual "you pay", "no, you pay" buckpassing.

"Require Medsafe to approve new pharmaceuticals within 30 days of them being approved by at least two overseas regulatory agencies recognised by New Zealand" (also word for word in the ACT coalition agreement) - as I understand it, a policy win for the New Zealand Initiative and/or its chief economist Eric Crampton, and wholly sensible. One of the bigger impediments across areas as diverse as building materials and medicines is the potentially anti-competitive barrier of unnecessarily high, or expensive, 'health and safety' non-tariff barriers, and we could usefully dismantle quite a few of them. In general we should efficiently free-ride on other respectable countries' testing or experience: I've always liked the idea, for example, of using overseas prices for telco services as a first sighting shot on what the local regulated price should be. Along similar lines National's 100 point plan had as number 32, "Strengthen competition for building materials with automatic approval for appropriately certified building materials from the US, Europe, the UK and Australia".

"Better recognise people with overseas medical qualifications and experience for accreditation in New Zealand" - same again. Unnecessary 'credentialism' and conveniently incumbent professional licencing 'gatekeepers' need to have their wings clipped. Same sentiment in the ACT agreement with its "Better recognise people with overseas medical qualifications and experience for accreditation in New Zealand including consideration of an occupations tribunal".

Turning to the ACT agreement:

"Legislate to improve the quality of regulation, ensuring that regulatory decisions are based on principles of good law-making and economic efficiency, by passing the Regulatory Standards Act as soon as practicable" - applehood and mother pie, and who'd disagree. Whether it would extend as far as a rethink of say Part IV of the Commerce Act, where I've always felt there may be less heavy duty alternatives to our rate of return regulation, we'll have to wait and see. And while it might be implicitly tucked into that "economic efficiency" reference, I'd like to see an explicit criterion in any eventual Act that would require any proposed regulation to be assessed for its impact on competition and consumer choice.

"Establish a new government department, required to assess the quality of new and existing legislation and regulation, funded by disestablishing the Productivity Commission and consolidating some regulatory quality work across the public sector where appropriate" - the country has not gone into mourning over the demise of the Productivity Commission (though as the productivity challenge hasn't gone away I personally would like to see something resurrected along the solid lines of the UK's Productivity Institute), and if the money is used to fund better regulation, why not. 

"In consultation with the relevant Minister, carry out regulation sector reviews, which could include the primary industries, the finance sector, early childhood education, and healthcare occupational licencing, in each case producing an omnibus bill for regulatory reform of laws affecting the sector" - a broad agenda which could encompass not just the benighted CCCFA (coming up next) but also ComCom's payments system regulation. Note too yet another welcome reference to tackling potentially overprotective professional qualification regimes.

"Rewrite the Credit Contracts and Consumer Finance Act 2003 to protect vulnerable consumers without unnecessarily limiting access to credit" (which also featured in the National Party's 100 point plan as number 48, "Cut financial red tape that is stifling investment, including significantly reducing the scope of the CCCFA which has restricted access to credit") - pretty much everyone accepts that successive tinkering with the CCCFA hasn't left us in a good place. Well-meaning attempts to protect the vulnerable ended up with lenders emptying people's waste baskets looking for receipts for Netflix subscriptions.

"Amend the Overseas Investment Act 2005 to limit ministerial decision making to national security concerns and make such decision making more timely" - completely reasonable. We already have one of the more restrictive overseas investment approval regimes by OECD standards, as shown in the graph below, and we need to lighten up if (among other things) we want another supermarket entrant or we want to attract some of the vast global pool of private equity money that's currently sloshing around looking for infrastructure opportunities (in particular for decarbonisation). We don't need any repeats of a Minister telling an overseas pension fund that they can't take a stake in a New Zealand airport. In the National Party's 100 point plan, they had as number 66 a very specific reason for liberalisation, "Amend the Overseas Investment Act and Income Tax Act to give investors certainty to invest in Build-to-Rent projects", which has since made it into the government's 100 day action plan, but hopefully the Overseas Investment Act will be freed up to benefit a wide variety of potential investors.

"Reform market studies introduced by the Commerce Amendment Act 2018 to focus on reducing regulatory barriers to new entrants to drive competition" - I can't say I like the look of this, for various reasons. For one thing, it's too early to be tinkering with a regime that's still new. More importantly, it looks as if it might be intended to limit the scope of future market studies solely to reducing regulatory barriers, which would be a mistake. There will be instances (such as the petrol stations) where the big competition issues are primarily ones of market power, not regulatory barriers, and the Commission shouldn't be barred from looking at them. It's arguable that the threshold test - "in the public interest" - for the Commission in s50 or the Minister in s51 to kick off a market study is too broad, but it's better than a threshold test that would be too narrow. On a more charitable reading, perhaps the "reform" will require the Commission to make sure that it uncovers all regulatory barriers in a study, but on the other hand they've been doing that quite well already (eg the thicket of resource consent, land planning and Overseas Investment Act hurdles to new supermarkets), so unfortunately the more uncharitable reading of an overrestrictive rollback looks the way to bet at the moment.

"Immediately issue stop-work notices on several workstreams, including Three Waters (with assets returned to council ownership)" - the 100 day action plan includes "Repeal Labour’s Three Waters legislation", so that's underway as a first step. What happens after that? National's 100 point plan had included (as number 68) "Restore council ownership and control of water assets, with strict rules for water quality and investment requirements" and (as number 69 in a welcome pinpointing of the current dynamic inefficiency debacle) "Introduce a requirement for water service delivery models to be financially sustainable, so that future generations don’t inherit outdated or failing infrastructure". Perhaps that can all be done under the remit of the current Water Services Economic Efficiency and Consumer Protection Act 2023, which installed ComCom as a sectoral regulator very much along the lines of its role as an electricity lines regulator (and which I'd presciently argued here was likely to be a better plan than Three Waters). Whether that will be timely enough - there's a rather leisurely timeframe in the Act for introducing regulation - or effective enough remains to be seen. ComCom can set investment paths, but with something like $150 billion worth of overdue maintenance to be paid for, it's still (however much you might like to stick it to councils for their previous pusillanimous water mismanagement) not obvious that they're in a financial position to pay for it.

Finally, there was a chance that a more business-friendly, deregulatory government might be minded to roll back some of the features of our existing competition regime. But nothing's been unwound, so that's something. On the other hand nothing's been advanced, either, even though the Commerce Act is now looking a bit shopworn. Understandably the negotiators had bigger things on their minds.

If I've missed anything, let me know and I'll happily update.

Good books 2021

Over the summer holidays we like to blob out and read, and I've caught up with some great titles.

In economics, top of the list are two excellent books, Zachary D Carter's The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes; and Matt Ridley's How Innovation Works. I've also enjoyed Daniel Markovits' The Meritocracy Trap (and in the same area I've got Michael Sandel's The Tyranny of Merit: What's become of the common good? lined up); and next on the runway will be Robert Skidelsky's What's Wrong with Economics? A primer for the perplexed. Tim Harford's How to Make the World Add Up: Ten Rules for Thinking Differently About Numbers focuses on the behavioural biases we bring to statistics, and is likely to prompt you to have a go, if you haven't yet, at Daniel Kahneman's fascinating Thinking Fast and Slow.

In biography, I hugely enjoyed Fredrik Logevall's JFK: Volume 1, 1917-1956, where the story reaches JFK's (in retrospect fortunate) failure to get the Democratic vice-presidential nomination in 1956 and his decision to go for the big one in 1960. Volker Ulrich's second volume, Hitler: Downfall, 1939-1945, necessarily has more military history than the politics and personalities of the previous Hitler: Ascent 1889-1939, but is also a good read. We've been blessed with some great biographies in recent years: try Ron Chernow's Grant (Ulysses S, that is), or Charles Moore's three-decker biography of Margaret Thatcher.

In politics, I defy anyone not to enjoy Sasha Swire's ringside view of the Cameron years, Diary of an MP's Wife. Still in the UK, both Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire's Left Out: The Inside Story of Labour Under Corbyn, and Tom Bower's Boris Johnson: The Gambler, are well worth reading. Anne Applebaum's Twilight of Democracy: The Failure of Politics and the Parting of Friends will get you thinking about the origins of polarisation, populism and demagoguery, and dovetails nicely with Ian Dunt's How To be a Liberal.

And in history I'm well into Ritchie Robertson's enormous The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness 1680-1790, and when that's finished I'll be starting Katja Hoyer's Blood and Iron: The Rise and Fall of the German Empire 1871-1918. If you've any nostalgia for hereditary rule, Martin Rady's The Habsburgs: The rise and fall of a world power will put you right. While you're wandering around central Europe, try Richard Fidler's The Golden Maze: A biography of Prague. 

After all that highbrow fare, I confess my fiction tastes run to private eyes and the more intelligent espionage thrillers. This summer's haul included the third in Glen Erik Hamilton's Seattle-based Van Shaw series, Every Day Above Ground, Peter Hanington's A Single Source (an oldstyle BBC Radio journalist gets caught up in illicit arms smuggling during the Arab Spring), Henning Maskell's After the Fire (he's best known for his Inspector Wallender books, this is a one-off), and Liz Moore's A Long Bright River (Philadelphia policewoman on trail of someone killing young women,and her drug addict sister is one potential target). I'm halfway through Cecilia Ekbäck's very well written The Historians, set in the murky politics of WW2 Sweden.

I'm a big fan of the physical book. I like the heft, the shape, the smell of a new book. Our house is stacked with them. So I've had to be dragged kicking and screaming to the idea of a Kindle. But now that I'm there, I have to say, it's terrific. See a good review, and you can have the book on your Kindle a few minutes later. It's great on a plane or anywhere else bulk comes into consideration. While I'll never begrudge the price of a good book, and I'm still reading both physical and digital versions, the Kindle price for the e-version is quite handy, too.  And if your partner's sleeping habits aren't synchronised with yours (ours aren't), with a backlit Kindle you can keep reading in bed when the lights are off.

More market studies

We've got more market studies lining up: as Labour announced during the election campaign there will be two new ones, into supermarkets and building materials. 

No dramas there, but there are two aspects I'd like to pick up on.

One is that the Commerce Act says that either the Commerce Commission (s50) or the Minister for Commerce (s51), now Dr David Clark, can initiate a market study if either "considers it to be in the public interest to do so". "In the public interest" isn't defined, but the FAQ that went out with the announcement included this:

A study is considered to be in the public interest if it promotes the purpose of the Commerce Act – to promote competition in markets for the long-term benefit of consumers within New Zealand, and the following criteria may be relevant:

• There are existing indications of competition problems in the market (such as high prices or low levels of innovation).
• The market is of strategic importance to the New Zealand economy or consumers.
•  It is likely there will be viable solutions to any issues that are found.
•  A formal Commerce Commission study would add value above work that could be done by other government agencies.

That's not a bad checklist. I wouldn't have run with the "strategic" point myself but the others look good. It mightn't be a bad idea to lock the criteria in, in some codified form.

The timing of the announcement though was not ideal. Last December, when I said "I'd heard rumours" about the next market studies, it was pretty much an open secret around the competition policy traps that supermarkets and building materials were next cabs off the rank. Either of them could have been got underway then, once the Commission's resources had been freed up after the petrol market study was finished, rather than nine months later in the middle of an election campaign. 

I don't mind candidates for office telling us what they plan to do: heaven knows, we've seen enough in New Zealand of politicians springing things on us. But we are in the early stages of bedding in our new regime and it would be better if the initiation of market studies were kept away from electioneering. We don't need the risk that business, and perhaps wider public, support for our shiny new market studies gets chipped away if the process appears politicised. 

Not good enough

We're about to have the most important Budget in a generation. There's no question that Grant Robertson has inherited one of the most difficult challenges - probably the greatest - in living memory. What he does, or doesn't do, will define how, at a minimum, we cope in the near-term with covid, and, in all probability, will have longer-term repercussions on how our economy behaves and evolves. I wish him well. I doubt if there's anyone, from any end of the political spectra, who'd disagree.

So there's obviously an enormous public interest in what he's going to do on Budget day, May 14.

Normally, the people most interested in fiscal policy sign up for the 'lock up' - a vetted group of people, mostly the media but also the likes of bank economists and sectoral lobbyists - who on Budget day get access (usually mid-morning) to the Budget documents ahead of their release, subject to a time embargo. The deal is, if you've got a strong interest in fiscal policy, and Treasury agrees you're a player in that space, you get to see the stuff in a controlled environment, and with the advantage of the preparation time, you will be able to provide informed commentary, but (because of the agreed embargo) not before the Minister of Finance does his thing in the House. Works for everyone. I've been in lots of them.

But not this year. I won't be there: neither will the bank economists, the trade unions, the farming organisations, the investment managers. Here's what's happened.

Earlier this week I asked Treasury what this year's arrangements were going to be, given that the usual physical gathering in the Beehive was obviously out of the question.

Back came the answer that "the Minister and the Speaker of the House have arranged for a Restricted Budget Briefing to be held at Parliament for accredited members of the Parliamentary Press Gallery only".

I pushed back. I mentioned, for example, that the Fed has managed highly market sensitive press conferences over video conference, as you can see for yourself here. In response to the suggestion that video conferences are supposedly not secure enough for Budget-sensitive information, I mentioned things like Zoom's 'waiting room' and password protected access, and the fact that Cabinet apparently has met over video with no issues. And I also said that Treasury has been able to rely for many years on an honour system where lock-up attendees, in good Kiwi fashion, can be trusted to do the right thing. And don't give me grief over the (one, isolated) abuse of the honour system at the equivalent RBNZ lockups. We're generally a high-trust society, and I like that, and I'd like to see it continue.

Got me nowhere. Everyone involved was very nice about it, but where we've apparently ended is that the most important Budget in our lifetime is going to get immediate scrutiny only from a very small group of political insiders. New Zealand deserves better: we don't need this highly important event filtered through this small-mesh sieve.

This is not right. I'm perfectly happy to accept that I've got an interest here: being able to make an on-the-spot quick assessment of the Budget is a plus for me, as it is for everyone else in the usual lock-up. But my wider point stands: civil society is better served by wider access, not less.

Along the way I also made the point that these days, it's easy enough to acknowledge that a decision can be revisited, or as I put it to them, "there's only upside in saying 'we thought we had to tightly corral it, but now that we've thought about it, we can do this'". That fell flat, too.

Of all the Budgets in all the world, this is the one that should be most open to immediate analysis. The powers that be can, and should, rethink.

The good old days. Not

Marilyn Waring's interesting memoir The Political Years is an eye-opener on New Zealand in the late 1970s and early 1980s. While she has a particular perspective to emphasise, there's no doubt that the casual sexism, racism and conservatism of the day that she recalls do not square with the "we've always been progressive since women got the vote in 1893" story we like to tell ourselves.

From an economic policy point of view, it's also a reminder to those who put 'Rogernomics' and 'Ruthanasia' in the 'awful neoliberalism experiment' basket that reform was needed. Even Waring, down the left end of the political spectrum, concludes (p46) that

Within just a few months [of first being elected in 1975], I was getting a picture of incredible inefficiencies. Tariff structures were a nightmare, and were still in hangover mode from the Second World War. Licensing was a mess: those who had import and transport licences ran small fiefdoms. Transportation regulations intended to protect the railways restricted truck movements without a special licence, adding significant costs. Vast amounts of primary production were subsidised. Far too much discretionary power rested in the hands of ministers. Certainly, that meant I might lobby for gains for my constituents, but the process needed a wholesale clean-out.

She gives examples (pp45-6) of the kind of lobbying involved: letters to ministers with "requests for relief of import duty on a sports cup for presentation at the local high school and for a licence to import woven woolen fabric for the Te Awamutu and District Pipe Band".

Mercifully most of that nonsense went overboard after trade liberalisations, but it's doubtful whether our chronic propensity for micromanagement is permanently buried at a crossroads with a stake through its heart. It's not that long ago that a government minister's approval was required for a Tourette's Syndrome sufferer to have access to a medical cannabis product. And in my own narrow neck of the woods, the Commerce Commission's "cease and desist" powers - designed to provide a timely interim stop to anti-competitive conduct until the substantive issues got litigated later - were so hedged about with preconditions and provisos that they were eventually abandoned as useless.

Another bad habit not fully kicked is unnecessary secrecy. In Waring's day, Robert Muldoon would not even share Treasury's analyses with his own MPs: on p256 she recounts how

Ruth Richardson, one of six new MPs in caucus [after the 1981 election], wasted no time in asking to see the Treasury reports on the state of the economy. Muldoon replied they were confidential, amd Hugh Templeton added that the secrecy gave Treasury the 'freedom to report'. The PM noted that the reports referred to high interest rates, devaluation, running down cash balances and internal liquidity under pressure. There was no cause for alarm, he said.

You can see why the Labour government of 1984-90 brought in the Public Finance Act to require a step change in transparency.

The same dubious "freedom to report" rationale was invoked to keep the proceedings of the Public Expenditure Committee secret. The Committee - which I'd guess was a forerunner of today's Finance and Expenditure Select Committee - was charged with "examining the Annual Reports and Accounts, and the Estimates of Expenditure, for every government ministry, department and agency" (p56), a highly important accountability role, especially given the limited other avenues at the time for scrutiny of the executive. Waring, appointed to the Committee and later its chair, questioned the secrecy and was told by the Clerk of the House (p56) that

Official papers prepared at the request of the Committee have always been regarded as confidential, and the assurance of confidentiality has been fundamental to the willingness of departments to supply frank and detailed examination.

We have, thankfully, largely moved on. But even today s9(2)(f)(iv) of our Official Information Act includes, as a valid reason for withholding information, "the withholding of the information is necessary to ... maintain the constitutional conventions for the time being which protect ... the confidentiality of advice tendered by Ministers of the Crown and officials" or under s9(2)(g)(i) to "maintain the effective conduct of public affairs through — (i) the free and frank expression of opinions by or between or to Ministers of the Crown or members of an organisation or officers and employees of any department or organisation in the course of their duty".

There may be genuine occasions when these confidentiality provisions need to apply, but a few minutes on Twitter will tell you that some entirely responsible and proper 'citizen journalists' will be wondering, after bumping heads with the OIA, exactly how far we've progressed from the Sir Humphrey Applebys of Waring's day.

Are we serious?

Every couple of years the OECD updates its Going For Growth reports, which are meant to be its best policy advice to governments on how to raise living standards. Or at least that's how it used to be: the focus up to 2017 was exclusively on productivity and incomes, but in 2017 it widened to include social inclusiveness and, in this latest iteration, brought in environmental sustainability as well. Worthy causes, to be sure, and there are of course interlinkages with productivity and incomes, but I'd have preferred if they'd kept Going For Growth as a productivity instruction manual. Especially for its New Zealand readership, given that our low productivity performance is something we self-evidently could use a bit of focused help with.

Not, I suspect, that Going For Growth has much of a New Zealand readership. Neither the 2017 version ('Take advice? Moi?') nor this latest one appears to have got much mainstream or social media attention. So if you're not one of the select policy tragics who've had a look, here are the OECD's five priorities for New Zealand (if this whets your appetite here's the full country report):

1. Reduce barriers to FDI [foreign direct investment] and trade and to competition in network sectors. Non-transparent screening, barriers to trade facilitation and competition in network sectors deter investment and hinder the competitiveness of downstream firms [in this bit they mean the 'barriers' to extend to 'barriers to competition']
2. Improve housing policies. Restrictive land-use policies reduce housing supply responsiveness to demand, accentuating price increases when demand rises
3. Reduce child poverty. Child poverty is higher than in the top performing countries. It has adverse effects on children’s health and development.
4. Reduce educational underachievement among specific groups. Students from Māori, Pasifika and vulnerable socio-economic backgrounds have much poorer education outcomes than others
5. Raise effectiveness of R&D support. Relatively low public funding of business R&D contributes to below average R&D intensity

Four of these were on the 2017 priority list, too (number 3 is a new one reflecting the new focus on social inclusiveness), and the implementation record since 2017 has been distinctly patchy. There was no action taken at all on number 1, for example. Number 2 continues to be a national scandal, and I see in today's DomPost that it's not just Auckland, either: "Wellington City has consented fewer buildings this year, its waiting list for social housing has spiked sharply, and its rental crisis is on par with Auckland's". The only achievement the OECD records on number 4 is the Sir Humphrey Appleby "appointment of a taskforce". Number 5 is the one recommendation where there has been anything like a respectable response: the current government has, for example, run with the recommendation to "make the tax credit refundable so that firms that are not yet profitable can benefit".

It's hard to see why we haven't followed up what looks like a reasonably uncontroversial list of targets and tactics (although the anti-trade nutters may jib at #1). They're almost certainly not enough to make huge inroads into our productivity problems, but they'd be a good start, and a couple of them (#3 and #4 in particular) would be worth doing in their own right, even if they didn't have spillover productivity effects on the talents of our workforce.

There is one possible explanation, albeit a depressing one. In the economics trade we call it "revealed preference": you can figure out what people value from what they actually do.  It could well be that successive central and local governments haven't put the priority they claimed on higher living standards. When it's come to having the national incomes to pay for modern healthcare, or rationing the expensive drugs, they've preferred rationing. When it's come to a choice between wealthy homeowners having an unobstructed view of a volcano, and poor families with young children sleeping in cars, they've been with the homeowners.

It would be nice of the OECD's 2021 scorecard showed a better rise to our livings standards challenge. But I won't be holding my breath.

Let's get more active

By far the best single way to get unemployment down is to keep up a good run of economic growth at a robust pace. Not only does the unemployment rate go down, but the longer and stronger the expansion, the more it succeeds in bringing more marginalised groups into employment.

I've shown previous versions of the graph below: here's the up to date version, which shows (yet again) that less favoured groups suffer distressingly high rises in unemployment when the business cycle goes pear-shaped, but conversely a long expansion works its magic on everyone, even on those who tend to be on the outer. It's not perfect - rates of unemployment for some groups, notably Maori and Pasifika, are still too high - but the long post-GFC expansion has seen big falls in the unemployment rate across all groups..

Because growth alone will not deal to everything there's always a role for 'active' labour market policies that try to make the labour market work better. Residual unemployment for example could be down to things like skills mismatches: employers are looking for people with skills they don't have. Or it could be down to regional immobility: who's going to move from Northland to a job vacancy in Auckland given the cost of putting a roof over your head in Auckland? And there can be other mismatches preventing people willing to hire from signing the deal with people wanting to work.

There's a brilliant new bit of research out looking at active labour market policies, and which ones work. They're not just any old active policies: they're ones where there was a control group experiment, where you can see how those who went through the programme fared compared to those who didn't, which is how the researchers can tell if it made any difference. Here's the more readable version for the intelligent public - 'Understanding what works for active labour market policies', on the excellent Vox site - and full-blown policy tragics can get the more academic version here.

Here's the key result in terms of the impacts on earnings and employment:

If we focus on the median impact on earnings, wage subsidies and independent worker assistance ['Support to micro-entrepreneurs and independent workers'] show the greatest impact relative to the control group, with improvements of 16.7% and 16.5%, respectively. Vocational training programs have a median impact of 7.7%, while employment services show an almost negligible impact. The median impact on employment outcomes exhibits a similar pattern

Here's the graph they drew to show the results, though to be honest it's hard to see the scale of the impact with the vertical scale they've chosen to use.

They also discovered a variety of other things that make complete sense: "Individualised coaching or follow-up of the participants, training exclusively focused on a specific industry, and the provision of monetary incentives to trainees all correlate with better outcomes in vocational training programmes (the most frequent ALMPs in our dataset)", and, unsurprisingly, they also found that you get better outcomes when you run these programmes in good times rather than in the pits of a recession.

They also found (noting that cost data isn't uniformly available) that you get what you pay for. As the graph below shows, employment services programmes are cheap, but useless, while the most effective option, helping people to do their own thing, costs the most.

There's a lot we could learn from this. Currently we're down the wrong end of the OECD league ladder when it comes to what we spend on active labour market policies (as I discussed here). This research gives us a pretty clear steer on what we should do to up our game.

It's also left me wondering about our policy institutions. This research works because all over the world people have invested in randomised control trials - experiments where you try something out and compare it with what happens where it wasn't rolled out. But I can't think of many home-grown examples where we've had a go at economic policy field experiments: charter schools, maybe, but they got sat on.

My feeling is that we're too fond of the over-dirigiste 'one size fits all' approach. And our chronic political oppositionism makes both the public service and the decision-making politicians far too wary of experiments that might go wrong - even when they might hold valuable information about what works and what doesn't. There's too high a political price to pay for what will be pilloried as 'failure', and it's hindering finding out what might or might not make a real difference to those hardest to get into work. We should move on: it's time to join the adult policy world.

What did we learn?

Earlier this month I posted what I hope will be my last tiki tour of some Special Housing Areas (SHAs) near our place. And at the time I said I'd have a go at trying to put some figures on the effectiveness or otherwise of the whole SHA experiment.

I've had a look, and there's good news and bad news.

The bad news is that, using MBIE's latest Auckland Housing Accord Monitoring report (available here, with all the previous ones), I can't tell whether the SHA experiment made a difference.

There were 5,527 building consents in the SHAs over the October '13 to June '17 period covered by the report. That made up 16.4% of the total 33,639 consents issued. But whether you should think about this as 'big' or 'small' isn't obvious, because you don't know how many of these SHA approvals would have happened in any event, and were merely shifted from one box (ordinary consent) to another (SHA consent).

You can't tell whether there was any net addition from the SHA initiative. Nor can you tell (although this was one of its objectives) whether the SHA consent process sped up development. To date, 3,105 dwellings have been completed in the SHAs: the report says "The 154 Special Housing Areas are expected to eventually supply over 66,000 dwellings or sections over 20-25 years". At the risk of sounding snarky, this doesn't look like lightning progress towards that target.

I'm prepared to believe that SHAs may have facilitated some particular, large projects. As the graph below shows, more than half (56.6%) of all the SHA consents were in just 8 of the 154 SHAs (the 8 with more than 300 consents). If they were instrumental in getting the Hobsonvilles underway, excellent. But again it's hard to know whether the counterfactual is that Hobsonville would have gone ahead anyway, or faster without jumping through the SHA hoops.

If I was facing a firing squad and had to guess to save my life, I would guess that the SHAs were an intrinsically nifty idea (faster consents for helping with social objectives) but that (a) the planning streamlining may have been more apparent than real (b) the dollar give-up by developers to meet the social objective became too expensive in a roaring bull market and (c) some developers weren't going to be swayed by anything (SHAs included) until they saw how the Auckland Unitary Plan played out. Goodish plan, somewhat sidelined by events. Story of all our lives.

And the good news?

People gave a new idea a go, in an area that badly needed moving along. It was an experiment. And we need more experiments like it, in housing and across the board. Not that our oppositional political structures are well suited to running them: we haven't exactly got a system that tolerates "mistakes" or "failures", when in reality they're nothing of the kind. They're opportunities to find out what works and what doesn't.

In that light, though, if you're going to run experiments, as you should, you have to figure out beforehand, in some detail, how you'll know whether the experiment was a success or not. Sometimes it's obvious - the laboratory explodes - but often it isn't. In the case of the Auckland Housing Accord, progress towards consent targets was not an adequate metric. It needed some sort of control group comparing SHA and non-SHA volumes and speeds. My little trek around Browns Bay but writ larger, and with a budget. And it would have been useful to get inside developers' heads to see exactly what mattered most to them.

And never the twain shall meet*

According to the text of the Labour/Greens confidence and supply agreement, "Auckland’s East-West motorway link will not proceed as currently proposed".

I'm not surprised, though before I was asked to look at the East-West Link, I'd have had a different reaction. Auckland's been so short of infrastructure investment, and transport investment in particular, that I would have welcomed anything at all that helped, even if it wasn't especially efficient. Two billion dollars, the ballpark cost of the Link, however poorly spent, had to be some sort of advance on half of five eighths of the proverbial alternative.

And then the Campaign for Better Transport asked me to have a look at how the New Zealand Transport Agency had signed off on the Link. A Board of Inquiry had been set up to decide whether to approve the Link: would I be interested in putting in an expert view? I would. I did.

I was rather surprised when I had a look at the benefit/cost ratios for each of the six options that the NZTA had shortlisted for the Link. The option chosen was far from being the best on a benefit/cost basis. Compared to the chosen one, there was an alternative that would have achieved slightly more benefits, but for only 60% of the cost. And there was another one that was less ambitious - only half of the benefits - but was very cheap indeed, at only a quarter of the cost. The preferred option was, bluntly, inefficient.

But mankind does not live by cost/benefit ratios alone, and the NZTA, sensibly, also put all six options through a 'multi criteria analysis' wringer, prodding them from every possible perspective, including Maori, historical, and environmental.

Again the preferred option didn't stand out. That cheap and cheerful one - half the benefits but very cheap to do - scrubbed up well (again). And even if you played around with the weightings, as I did, I couldn't get the NZTA's preferred option to come out on top. Even when I gave double weighting to transport outcomes, which after all might be what the NZTA was prioritising, there were better ways of doing the Link than the NZTA's golden-haired choice.

As happens in these sorts of proceedings there's a "hot tub" where the economists get together to say what they can agree on and what they can't. On this occasion there were five of us: in the post-tub joint statement we put in to the Inquiry, four of us agreed that "The [NZTA's] application [to build the Link] and subsequent evidence does not establish...How Option F [the NZTA's preference] was arrived at as the preferred option and, in particular, how the Option reconciled with the NZ Transport Agency's own system for prioritising Projects". The NZTA's economist disagreed.

In sum, I couldn't make much sense of the NZTA's justification for ploughing ahead with their preferred option, and said so when I fronted up to the Inquiry. If you're seriously short of better things to do, the transcript is here. I come onto the stage at page 4897 (!) and the most relevant bits are on pages 4907-10 where I have trouble with the NZTA's thinking behind its choice and finish up by rhetorically asking the NZTA, "with all that lovely information, why did you do F?"

Lots of other people have been having trouble with the decision, too. Cameron Pitches of the Campaign for Better Transport has had a go at 'The Economics of the East West Link' with part two here, and the Greater Auckland site has a string of posts, with highlights being the latest 'Where to now for the East West Link?' and the earlier 'Rethinking the East-West Link'.  The Spinoff's  Simon Wilson has also been on the case, with 'The most expensive road in New Zealand history is coming to Auckland. Why?' and '‘I have not quantified the benefits’: the astonishing truth about NZ’s most expensive road ever'.

Bottom line: my guess would be that you could deal to a lot of the Onehunga/Penrose congestion with a slimmed-down version of the Link, and still have a billion dollars left over. That's a rather irresistible bit of economic - and political - calculus.

What happens to the Inquiry itself? Far as I know, it's still due to deliver its final decision by December 22, and I hope it's let do it. The board seemed to me to be a very sharp collection of folks, and I'd like to hear what they made of it all, even if swathes of it may have become moot.

There's also a point of law they had to consider that could be important for future regulatory proceedings. Was the board constrained to examining only what the NZTA put in front of it, or could it enquire into the NZTA's thought processes when it came up with the scheme?

As the chair of the Inquiry said (p4909, para 35)

it seems to be  reasonably clear law that we as a Board can't sit down and start scratching our heads and drawing alternative lines over bits of paper and saying, "Well, this option might have been better than that option" etc. We really have to judge on the merits what's been served up to us.

But on the other hand as one of his colleagues said (p4913, para 15)

I think you're quite right that we have to be satisfied that there was a robust process of evaluation of the alternatives.

In practice it may not make a huge difference. Submitters could (and did) propose that the NZTA's preferred option should have been redirected around this town centre, or slimmed down along that stretch, or mitigated a different way, and would have effectively smuggled the NZTA's discarded options back into the proceedings irrespective of whether the Board itself did not want to revisit the NZTA's original decision.

But it's still an important point. My preference lies down the end of tyre-kicking that "robust process of evaluation of the alternatives". If, by analogy, some group appeared before the Commerce Commission for authorisation of an otherwise anti-competitive arrangement that nonetheless has a net public benefit, I would expect Commissioners to ask, very early in the piece, did you consider other or better or less intrusive ways of doing this? What did you find? Why did you go with this one? And if they weren't satisfied, I'd expect them to say, go back to the drawing board.

If Boards of Inquiry find they don't have these powers under the Resource Management Act process, then maybe we should fix the Act so that they do.

*OK, pretty corny, but if you don't recognise it it's a bit of Rudyard Kipling: "Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet"

Dear Kris...

Welcome to your new role as competition czar and overlord of the Commerce Commission.

It's now up to you to make sure that consumers continue to get a good choice of goods and services at fair prices, and that businesses can compete vigorously for their custom.

You'll find that the Commission, and the competition policy bits of MBIE, are full of talented people with their hearts in the right place. You'll also find that many of them are frustrated by the glacial pace of policy change.

So my first suggestion is: don't be another obstacle in their way. Move things along.

What things? Start with these.

Currently the plan is that the Commission will - sometime - be allowed to look into competition problems, but only if asked to by the government (the jargon is "market studies").

By all means keep the option for you and your colleagues to ask the Commission to look at stuff. You'll find (for example) there's a lot of support for a study of our petrol industry.

But a much better plan would be to let the Commission also look at things off its own bat. That's normal overseas, by the way, and if you want to see a good example of how it works, look at the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission's series of  reports on petrol markets in Oz. Here's their latest media release, 'Lack of competition driving high Brisbane petrol prices'.

Keep a budget lid on it, though. Currently the plan is, the Commission will get $1.5 million a year, max. That's plenty, and will give them the right incentive to be efficient.

Next there's cartels. We were going to jail 'hard core' cartelists, the guys who secretly get together in hotel rooms at trade shows and conspire to fix prices, rig auctions, and carve up the world's markets among themselves.

One of your predecessors said, Nah, let's not feel their collar. He was wrong. The Aussies - and others - who can jail these crooks have the right end of the stick.

And while you're dealing to cartelists, take away the special treatment for the shipping lines. They still get their own cosy bit of the Commerce Act. They shouldn't, especially since they've been revealed to be global cartelists (you'll enjoy this). If they need to coordinate things, have them get an authorisation from the Commission, just like everyone else.

Now a trickier one. It's tricky here, and everywhere, but now you're The Man who's got to make the call.

It's what to do when a big company is using its size to impede or eliminate smaller competitors ("abuse of market power"). We have a law against it - section 36 of the Commerce Act. But the law is broken. It's incapable of pinging anything except in very rare cases. It's like nailing jelly to the wall. Disclosure: I've been one of those jelly-nailers.

But you don't have to take my word for it: you'll be having a early coffee, I dare say, with Mark Berry at the Commission, the current chief jelly-nailer. He'll tell you that s36 is knackered, and he's right.

Answer? The Aussies have turned their minds to this (their "Harper review") and fixed their law. So the answer is, import their wording holus bolus into our own Commerce Act. And strike a blow for trans-Tasman harmonisation while you're at it. The media release writes itself.

While you're having your first meet and greet coffees, have a natter with Murray Sherwin and the guys at the Productivity Commission. Your colleagues with economic portfolios will soon be tearing their hair out over New Zealand's poor productivity performance: as Murray and his mates will tell you, one of the answers is stronger competition to put the heat on business performance.

One last thing.

It's easy to get into an anti-business mindset in the competition and regulation game - all these cartels and abuses of market power and whatnot.

Don't go there. The thing that you've got to stay focussed on is the competitive process itself. That's what delivers the benefits to consumers, and to the businesses who best meet their needs.

And if anyone down the big end of town starts giving you gyp about an anti-business stance, quietly remind them that the primary victim of cartels and other rorts is often other businesses. They want an example? The cardboard box rort in Australia: every company on either side of the Tasman  (including some very large ones) who wanted to put their stuff in a box was being ripped off.

That's enough to be going on with - good luck!

Looking for ideas?

So we've got a new government, and lots of people have been wishing things on them.

And so am I.

Here's one that's well up my list: roll out the infrastructure we need, and pull finger about it while you're at it.

The outgoing government, for all the good stuff it did in some areas, was desperately slow at getting long overdue infrastructure built: 30 year timeframes before we would even start building airport and North Shore links in Auckland were just absurd. And as I've said before and the OECD has said as well this is a once in a generation opportunity to fill our boots with unusually cheap funding to pay for it.

But you don't have to take just my word for it. Here's the IMF's wording in this month's update to its flagship World Economic Outlook (p28, Chapter 1):

Investment in physical infrastructure: Empirical evidence from advanced economies suggests that, if done right, infrastructure investment brings both short- and long-term benefits: an increase in public investment of 1 percent of GDP can raise the level of output by 1½ percent over the medium term...After three decades of almost continuous decline, public investment in infrastructure and the stock of public capital as a share of output are near historic lows in advanced economies. Many countries could take advantage of the favorable funding environment [see? see?] to improve the quality of the existing infrastructure stock and implement new projects (see Chapter 3 of the October 2014 WEO). Countries with deficits in infrastructure include Australia, Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States [and us, as I pointed out for example here]. Priorities vary but, in most cases, include upgrading surface transportation and improving infrastructure technologies (in high-speed rail, ports, telecommunications, broadband), as well as green investments.

Fire up the JCBs.

Another part of the house price story

Housing is understandably high on the political agenda at the moment. But amidst all the blame-seeking and potential policy responses, one of the big drivers of our high house prices seems to be largely ignored, in part because it doesn't give the pollies any room to point the finger at their opponents.

The reason it doesn't is because it's a circumstance almost completely out of our own hands: the cost of our longer-term fixed rate mortgages is very low by historical standards, and that's almost completely because of international trends. We essentially import world bond yields - as the RBNZ's economists documented here - plus a risk premium for being New Zealand, and the banks onlend to fixed rate borrowers at that rate plus a commercial margin.

Here's a chart of current benchmark (10 year) bond yields across a range of the developed economies, using data from the Financial Times.

Long term interest rates are unusually low mainly because four of the major central banks - in the US, the Eurozone, Japan and the UK - have been keeping them very low by buying bonds (sending their price up and hence their yield down), a policy often known as 'quantitative easing' or QE. It's been part of their plan to give post-GFC monetary policy more oomph: traditionally, central banks have only bothered with short-term interest rates, whereas QE also gives them a good deal of control over longer term ones as well. Low yields in the QE countries have had knock-on effects on yields in non-QE ones like Switzerland.

And 'unusually low' doesn't even begin to describe the outcome. There are now literally trillions of dollars' worth of bonds (some US$9 trillion according to the FT) trading on negative yields: you pay the borrower for the privilege of investing in its debt. You can see in the chart, for example, that the Swiss and Japanese governments can borrow money for as long as 10 years where the investors end up paying the government. Just this week the Austrian government raised five year debt at a 'cost' of -0.165% a year.

We know that our own central bank is keeping short-term rates low - "Monetary policy will remain accommodative for a considerable period" as the latest policy decision put it - and that has been one of the elements in the recent price boom. As floating rates linked to the RBNZ's policy dropped, and household incomes kept growing, there was a surge in mortgage serviceability, which has been one of the big moving parts in the consequent boom in prices. But you knew that.

What's been less emphasised if that even if the RBNZ hadn't cut short term rates to where it has, the rest of the world's central banks dealt us substantially lower longer-term fixed rate mortgages in any event. And that boost to the demand side of the market isn't going away anytime soon. In the US the Fed is getting close to easing back on the scale of its QE (still buying bonds, but not as many), and the Bank of England and the European Central Bank may start heading the same way later this year or (more likely) next, while Japan looks set to keep its current QE going into the indefinite future. Whatever unwinding of QE that eventually materialises is going to be a slow, careful, gradual, medium-term process. There could well be local five year fixed rate mortgages around the 6% mark for quite a while yet.

There's another element to this imported easy monetary policy. Around the world there's been what the investment professionals have been calling "the hunt for yield" or, in more purple moments, "the craze for yield". The traditional widows-and-orphans assets of money in the bank and government bonds have been yielding little or nothing (indeed, US$9 trillion worth of less than nothing). So even conservative investors have been forced either to swallow the unattractive terms on their usual fare - this week Austria sold €3.5 billion of bonds with a hundred year maturity on a preposterously low 2.1% yield - or instead to head into income-yielding assets like property that offer something better.

The local  investor is making the same calculation. Even at current high prices you can still get a 3.5% to 4.0% rental yield on an Auckland house, according to the (very useful) data compiled by interest.co.nz. It's not what a conservative investor would normally be looking for from an investment property, but it beats the bank deposit and government stock alternatives. In our own little way we've got the same hunt for yield: it's not as extreme as in some places  - as the graph shows, our bond yields haven't dropped to Japanese or Eurozone levels - but it's another part of the picture.

And if you think the link between loose overseas monetary policy and New Zealand house prices sounds like the abstract reasoning only an economist could come up with, then you haven't paid enough attention to the Irish house price boom and bust. Ireland, which had been growing like topsy, was gifted eurozone interest rates that were too low for its circumstances. House prices exploded.

Speaking of adding fuel to flames, why would you increase subsidies for first home buyers? As an elementary bit of sketching supply and demand curves on the back of a shopping receipt would show you, the only immediate effect of subsidising the demand for something in fixed supply is to raise its price by the full amount of the subsidy. And it's not only ineffective, it's regressive - a straight transfer from the taxpayer (including all the low earners who pay tax from dollar one) to the house owner. In the longer run, it fattens the margins from housing development, so it could encourage more supply (assuming the binding constraint isn't land-use planning or construction capacity, and it might be), but in the long run we have all joined the bleeding choir invisible, we have snuffed it, we are no more. As a short-term policy it's worse than useless.

But that's this election for you. I'd thought we'd got past the worst of elections as they used to be, but this all-party lollyscramble, with its side dishes of daftness and deceit, is pure 1970s.

In the undergrowth of the Prefu

The Pre-election Economic and Fiscal Update - the 'Prefu' - came out yesterday when I was away giving some expert evidence at the Board of Inquiry into the proposed East-West Link motorway in Auckland. You've probably got the big picture about the Prefu already - if not try the ever reliable Rob Hosking's 'Joyce unveils rosy pre-election economic update' in the NBR (probably $, and worth the sub) - but now that I've read it, here are some additional perspectives.

There's an interesting difference of opinion between Treasury and the Reserve Bank about the outlook for interest rates and the Kiwi dollar. For Treasury, "The Official Cash Rate is expected to begin rising in mid-2018 as the Reserve Bank seeks to achieve its objective of stabilising inflation at the 2.0% mid-point of its target range. From around 2.0% in June 2018, short-term interest rates are forecast to rise to around 3.8% in June 2021" (p20 of the Prefu). For the RBNZ, as it said in Table 2.1 on p11 of the latest Monetary Policy Statement, the OCR is going to stay where it is all the way out to late 2019. For what it's worth, the financial markets (going by current futures pricing) lean more Treasury's way.

The difference on interest rates feeds into different views of where the overall value of the NZ$ is heading. As shown below, the Bank has it peaking around now and then going on a progressive slide, whereas Treasury (in Table 2 of the 'Additional information' bit of the Prefu) have it rising a little more and then staying there.

Another thing to note is the scale of the fiscal boost to the economy. The headline numbers on fiscal surpluses don't tell you much about whether tax and spending plans boost or brake the economy: instead, the 'fiscal impulse' is a go at figuring out what fiscal policy is doing, once you've stripped out all the cyclical things that happen to the fiscal books (like good times boosting the tax take, as they are now).

Estimates of the impulse are always iffy, although other sighting shots at it have come up with much the same as Treasury's. Here it is (again from the 'Additional info').

After years of grinding away at rebuilding the state's coffers - six successive years of tighter fiscal policy - it's now all systems go, with a fiscal boost in the year to June '18 amounting to some 1% of GDP, plus a bit more the following year. People will have all sorts of reactions to that, from a cynical quelle surprise in election year, to why not address some real needs now that the money's more available (the Family Incomes Package is in that boost).

Dull and boring macroeconomists however are likely to say that loosening fiscal policy in good times - 'procyclical' policy as we call it in our game - isn't usually the best of plans, though I'm prepared to cut some slack when some of the boost also addresses our infrastructure shortfall.

The final thing worth digging out of these fiscal updates is the outlook for profits. New Zealand's a bit short on profits data: Stats are working on it, but we don't yet have quarterly profits numbers, unlike for example Australia, the UK or the US. So anything that throws some light on what is one of the key moving parts in a market economy is always welcome. That's where Table 3 in the 'Additional info' comes in handy, as it has forecasts for 'operating surplus, net' (profits, essentially) for both agriculture and the rest of the economy.

They're only annual, but it all helps. Here's what the numbers look like (percentage changes aren't in the original table, so I've added some).

Down the farm you can see the huge impact of the recovery in dairy prices from their previously dire levels. Elsewhere it's not been the profits bonanza you might have expected from such a decent run for the overall economy - another part of our productivity paradox, perhaps? 

No cheap cars please, we're Aussies

What a bestiary Aussie politics is these days - and I don't mean the dogfights over second citizenships, though it would be nice if some of the oddballs who got in at the last election have at least one Irish grandparent, making them Irish citizens by descent and ineligible to keep their seats.

Away from the citizenship headlines, some of the pollies have been up to an unpleasantly protectionist bit of business which has seen the Aussie government rat on its previous commitment to consumers to allow some second hand car imports into Australia.

Infrastructure Minister Paul Fletcher's media release, 'New Road Vehicle Standards Act to Better Protect Consumers and Provide More Choice' (!) was dolled up in the dress of consumer welfare ("appropriate consumer awareness and protection arrangements") but none of the arguments he made looked convincing. The world Fletcher painted - of high administrative costs and no big net benefit to consumers - bears no relationship to the reality we've experienced in New Zealand. A reference to "price reductions estimated to be less than 2 per cent across the market" in particular looks a very lowball number, and I suspect the "across the market" reference, decoded, means "not a lot of change for some, but quite large reductions for others". As well as not conforming to the facts as we have actually lived through them, maintaining the ban flew in the face of advice from a variety of Australian bodies including the Harper review of competition policy.

Perhaps, despite their flimsiness, the Aussie government believes its justifications, but that may not all that is going through its mind. For the Aussie Financial Review, "It is understood that heavy lobbying by politically influential car sellers - as well as backbenchers such as John Williamson, Warren Entsch, Andrew Broad and Ian Macdonald - prompted the government to dump the option" (in  'Car buyers lose out as government backflips on parallel import rules', which may be paywalled, but if you haven't got a sub, get one).  Whatever the government's possible mix of intentions, an end effect was to do a big favour for a small, and, let's face it, rather unloved set of characters at the expense of doing a big favour for many millions of car buying households. And where, incidentally, were those tribunes of the people, Australia's Labor Party? They went along, too, as quoted in the AFR article.

A week earlier, by the way, the ACCC had come out with its draft market study into the selling of new cars. The media release said that "Complaints to the ACCC about new car manufacturers have risen to more than 10,000 over the past two years. Our draft report highlights the urgent need to address widespread issues in the industry". Not, in short, a sector that deserved ongoing favourable treatment, and I'd argue that the protectionist moat they're allowed to live behind is precisely the source of those "widespread issues" the ACCC found.

This latest proactive ACCC market study was another good example of the progress market studies can make to advance consumers' interests and promote more effective competition. So it's a shame that our own Commerce Commission isn't going to be able to do the same thing. As MBIE has said (at the foot of this webpage) the Commission isn't going to be able to start ones off its own bat: "The Commerce Commission’s market studies power will only be exercisable at the direction of the Minister of Commerce and Consumer Affairs", and then only after the Minister has satisfied an (as yet to be defined) "I smell a rat" test.

Still, it's something, and I suppose we should be somewhat grateful for the half a loaf we've got, or might eventually get. " Parliament", MBIE says, "will need to legislate for change to the Commerce Act for the market studies power to be introduced".

Oh goody. The most recent change to the Commerce Act - the Commerce (Cartels and Other Matters) Amendment Bill - took only five years, ten months and one day to go through the sausage factory.

Bums on diggers

The other day I was poring over the NZIER's latest compilation of consensus forecasts - an invaluable resource from many perspectives, not least for establishing the base scenario underpinning current financial market pricing - and I came across something really interesting*, which I've highlighted in the table below. It's the one that helpfully shows not only the consensus expectation, but also the high and low stabs at each variable.

That's a pretty remarkable range of views on the outlook for housebuilding. At one extreme you've got a scenario where - I'm abstracting here, but I think it's okay - the wind-down of the Canterbury rebuild will outweigh new housing starts in Auckland, detracting from overall GDP, while at the other end the Auckland market will go gangbusters, growing far more than Canterbury will contract, and boosting GDP.

To put some numerical perspective on it, the cumulative difference between the bullish and bearish housebuilding scenarios is $4.9 billion by March '20, which is equivalent to 2.1% of our current annual GDP. That's the difference between an expansion that's vigorous enough to keep the unemployment rate trending down, and one that would see it drift back up again.

If we assume that the wind-down in Canterbury is the relatively predictable moving part, then much of the forecast uncertainty boils down to differing views about the likely strength of house construction in Auckland. Presumably the bearish view is based on either low starts to begin with, or capacity constraints of one kind or another (labour, land, planning chokepoints) preventing potentially higher numbers of starts from getting underway.

And then this morning I saw MBIE has just published the latest vacancies data. Here it is, showing vacancies by occupation (there's a similar pattern by skill level). There's strong and rapidly increasing demand for the occupations you'd likely be looking for on the building site.

It could be that employers are having no trouble filling these vacancies: all we know for sure is that the hiring signs are out, and we don't know whether they're actually finding the people they're advertising for. And so far the Auckland numbers aren't flashing red lights: as the table below shows, Auckland is in the middle of the pack for year on year increases in vacancies.

It's also encouraging (although it was a few months back now) that the NZIER's March quarter Quarterly Survey of Business Opinion found that

Building firms...report a continued easing in the shortage of unskilled labour, although skilled labour remains very difficult to find. With the surge in net migration driven by an increase in the numbers of people coming in on work visas in the trades profession, this is helping to alleviate some of the labour shortages as construction activity continues to grow.

Though the QSBO can be read different ways: as the Reserve Bank put it in its latest Monetary Policy Statement (p21)

As suggested by the March Quarterly Survey of Business Opinion (QSBO), capacity constraints are tightening. Firms are reporting labour shortages and, more recently, some increased difficulty in obtaining finance. This appears to be related to the tightening in bank lending standards for residential property development and pressures created by rising construction costs

My instinct is that capacity constraints in Auckland are likely to be a worry. I'm not temperamentally inclined to restrict immigration in the first place, but if people are minded to, they ought to be careful about the risk of impeding the housing build we need to do, and the equally necessary infrastructure build, which calls on much the same labour force skills.

The Labour Party in its latest immigration policy at least had the wit, albeit in a clunky Gordon Brownish micromanagement way, to realise there's a potential issue here. It proposed that

Residential construction firms could hire a skilled tradesperson on a three-year work visa without having to meet the Labour Market Test if they pay a living wage and take on an apprentice for each overseas worker they hire. The number of places will be limited to 1,000 to 1,500 at a given time, which we expect will be additional to the construction work visas issued under the existing rules.

At the moment, I wouldn't give two hoots about Labour Market Tests and apprenticeship quotas. If there's an Irish lad on his gap year after secondary school, or anybody else prepared to get the roof on the house or pour the cement on a road, bring it on.

*Bearing in mind that this is an economist's idea of  'interesting'

Good books - May 2017

Leading off with economics, George Mason University professor Tyler Cowen's The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream (with its dedication "To the rebel in each of us") argues that America has become more static and less risk-taking, pointing  for example (on p177) to "lower residential mobility, less building in America's most productive cities, more segregation by income and status, a much greater concern with safety and risk, the coddling of our children, and fewer start-ups and slower growth in living standards, among others", including a reduced willingness and increased inability to undertake grand projects like those of the past (a moon landing, the interstate highway system). He also reckons the current zeitgeist of complacency will have nasty geopolitical results - along Minsky lines, a long period of stability encourages increasing risk-taking, culminating in the GFC in the economic sphere and who knows what in international politics.

I'm not sure what I think about his ideas, though if he's right people should be deeply concerned, in particular, about higher economic and social immobility: for us economic liberals (why, yes I am) high equality of opportunity is one of the bedrocks of a fair - and efficient - society. Could we be going the same way in New Zealand? It's possible: you look at deeply regressive ideas like ever more prevalent, and tighter, school zoning in Auckland, for example, or our inability to progress infrastructure build-out to any defensible timeframe, and you can see aspects of the same issues. In any event, it's very well written and well worth a read.

Not every economist, to put it mildly, writes so well. If you want to improve your own writing style (and want to understand why you should), or you're teaching economics students, who may get little (and possibly no) formal in-faculty communications training, try Deirdre McCloskey's Economical Writing. It's short (only 98 pages including the index), geared to economics examples, spot on in its advice, and (if you've got cash-strapped students), cheap. My copy arrived from The Book Depository for $27.24, delivery included.

In politics, the definitive account to date of the Brexit campaign is Sunday Times political editor Tim Shipman's All Out War: The Full Story of How Brexit Sank Britain's Political Class. It's a big book, and there's a cast of thousands at the beginning to get your head around, but stick with it. It's enormously well informed, and persuasive. One thing I learned is that David Cameron didn't fight the Remain side as hard as he might have, because (a) he thought he was going to win anyway and (b) he was thinking strategically about the embittered and disunited Conservative party he'd have to manage later if everyone had earlier put the boot in hard. Another was that I'd been inclined to blame the European Union for their short-sighted churlishness in not giving Cameron a renegotiation 'win' to wave in front of the UK voters. They're not blameless, but as it happens Cameron never asked for as much as he might have. And finally Cameron himself comes as a decent human being - one of the very few to keep their cool through the dramas of the campaign, even on election night as the shock vote came through - which is more than can be said for practically everyone else involved.

Which leads me to now freelance journalist (and previously with the Daily Mirror and Daily Telegraph) Rosa Prince and her Comrade Corbyn A Very Unlikely Coup: How Jeremy Corbyn stormed to the Labour leadership. Talk about unintended consequences: a Labour electoral system specifically designed to produce a short list of candidates acceptable to the parliamentary Labour party, before going to the wider electorate of unions and members, was subverted to produce the exact opposite. Oddly, at one level, I came away with a somewhat better opinion of Corbyn himself: he's loyal, honest, a hardworking and locally respected constituency MP, and (for the most part) straight up about what he believes in, unlike the trimmers and hedgers he faced in the run-off for leader. But a lot of what he believes in is either misguided or obnoxious: in particular, he strongly believes in "my enemy's enemy is my friend", leading to his support for the likes of the IRA and Hamas.

He's also got one asset that none of the other contenders had, and none of his plausible future rivals have, either: he's paid his dues over decades and decades. No demo was too small, no fund-raiser too insignificant, no campaign too tiny: he turned up for all of them. He's consequently built a devoted, well left of centre, activist supporter base that eats out of his hand, and which got a further big boost from the "three pound vote" feature of the leadership election. My guess is that there's little chance he'll resign if (as seems likely) he loses next month's general election: why would he? His 'Momentum' group has finally succeeded in grabbing control of Labour, where earlier 'entryist' conspiracies had failed. They won't be going away.

We were tweeting each other about something else, and Westpac's acting chief economist Michael Gordon reminded me that I'd never got round to reading Irish Times columnist Fintan O'Toole's Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger. It does what it says on the tin: it's a devastatingly hard-hitting, and accurate, critique. It perhaps underplays the role of joining the euro, which for already red-hot Ireland meant getting the monetary policy of slow growing Germany (and which helped do for Greece for similar reasons), but is otherwise bang on the mark.

My father used to tell the story of how one Irish MP would find out when constituents were due to receive the old age pension, and would write to them saying, "I've been in touch with the Department, and I'm pleased to be able to tell you that as a result of my inquiry you will get a pension of...". Shabby stuff - but the really shabby thing is that constituents expected MPs to deliver goodies by using 'influence' within the system. In one example in Ship of Fools, a building developer got a biddable politician to change the postal district of his development, so it would be reclassified into a more upmarket area. There are very good reasons for keeping MPs away from micromanagement of personal cases.

In fiction, we've sadly reached the end of the road for Peter Corris's epic Hardy series of Australian private eye stories, with the 42nd and last, Win, Lose or Draw, where Hardy is on the very cold trail of the abducted daughter of a wealthy businessman: she may or may not have been sighted, in very bad company, in Norfolk Island. Corris is flagging it away, after diabetes induced blindness has got too much for him. It's a real shame: the series is one of the classics of the private eye genre.

Joseph Knox's Sirens is a debut novel about police detective Aidan Waits in Manchester, who is called in to help rescue the runaway daughter of an important politician and goes undercover in her drug-running circle. She eventually dies from adulterated heroin as do seven middle class kids at a party (they turn blue). There's vivid detail about drug use and gang wars: one minder is force fed black and white paint, for reasons I'll leave you to discover for yourself. It's a complex plot, maybe almost over complex at the start, but otherwise it's very well written.

Another debut is L S Hilton's Maestra, where a  low on the totem pole woman at a posh art auction house rumbles a crooked art deal, gets fired, but ends up getting her revenge: it  involves a sting on Mafia art dealers (plus a lot else). Violent, with remarkably explicit sex from a female point of view: it ends 'To be continued'. I'm looking forward to the next instalment.

Finally I broke one of my own best rules - don't read private eye books where the private eye has a silly name - but I'm glad I did. George Galbraith, aka J K Rowling, is now up to three in her series about ex-military London private eye Cormoran Strike. Galbraith/Rowling is excellent at characterisation and tension-building: I loved the first, The Cuckoo's Calling; was okay with the second, The Silkworm (which may have elements of a roman à clef in the publishing world), though my wife thinks it's just as good as the first one, so what do I know; but in any event Rowling is back on song in the latest, Career of Evil. I gather there's a fourth on the way. Recommended.

An "ugly casserole" indeed

So we've tightened up our immigration settings, again. Opponents are saying it's fiddling at the margins. I hope the critics are right: while it's dismaying that they've felt the need to bend with the prevailing political winds at all - "an ugly casserole of prejudice, resentment, economic envy and xenophobia from which New Zealand is not exempt", as Vernon Small put it in his īnsightful Dom-Post article - I hope it's the absolute minimum the government could get away with.

Not that it's without its own political dangers.Throwing scraps of meat out of the sleigh as the wolves close in may delay the chase, but wolves soon learn to chase sleighs for reward, and will be after you fitter and faster than before.

And I certainly didn't like the "Kiwis first" messaging around the thing. That's more the sort of jingoism you expect from the Aussies, and indeed got this week in their own tightening of their immigration regime, which more obviously pandered to the likes of One Nation and is more likely to do real economic damage. Early reactions suggest they've shot themselves in the foot, making it harder for employers to fill hard-to-recruit vacancies.

Let's not pretend, either, that there's anything remotely linked to the economy behind this. It's pure politics.

For one thing, the cyclical state of the labour market is very strong. Wanna see a picture of a thriving labour market? Here's one from the ANZ's Bank's latest tot of job ads.

Wanna see another? This is MBIE's latest tot of vacancies - jobs available right now. High, and climbing steadily,

If you're concerned that unskilled emigrants are driving down wages and stealing the everyday battlers' jobs at the hard end of the labour market, the greatest rise in vacancies in recent years has actually been for unskilled and semi-skilled jobs.

So it's extraordinarily hard to make any case that immigrants have soaked up the available jobs. Despite a recent large increase in net migration, there are more vacancies available than ever, even at the low wage end.

As for the fable that immigrants are putting pressure on already stressed infrastructure, it's either a marginal effect or complete bollocks. Higher levels of net immigration are a relatively recent phenomenon - the last three years or so - whereas the infrastructure, especially in Auckland, was already stuffed every way to Sunday well before that. 

Here's the clincher: as an economist colleague helpfully pointed out when I was tweeting about this, there was very little difference between Statistics New Zealand's population projections for Auckland's population ten years ago and what has actually happened. We knew there was a surge coming, and didn't plan for it, and still aren't - that's the reality, under national and local administrations of all political hues. It's got very little if anything to do with migration, and everything to do with systematic underfunding of infrastructure and obstructive land-use and other regulation. Our politicians have preferred to run dairy farms, mine coal, deliver letters and keep prime housing land to grow onions, rather than deliver the social and physical infrastructure for a high-income economy.

And that's something else the anti-immigration crew are missing. Far from being a burden on the economy, many migrants are actually alleviating the roadblocks to growth we've inflicted on ourselves. Across the road from us, one of those terrible Asian property investors - probably got one of those suspicious Chinese-sounding surnames - has started to turn two houses into five. Round the corner another of these awful leeches has already redeveloped one house into three. Employment for two gangs of tradies, five extra houses. Not bad for two parasites.

Maybe I shouldn't be surprised about these latest turns of events here and in Australia. Liberal values and sensible economics are under attack pretty much everywhere, from the clowns in Washington to the Brexit-deluded in the UK through to the more sinister operators in (for example) France, Hungary and Poland. It's especially sad to see people "of the left", who might be expected to take a more progressive, internationalist view of the world, going along. 

But maybe there's hope around the corner. As this excellent article, 'In defence of liberalism', points out, the liberal values and better economic policies that created post World War Two prosperity are certainly under attack. But it concludes

the things we value can’t all be realised simultaneously and made compatible with each other. A liberal society is the best method yet devised of recognising this multiplicity of aims. It stresses value pluralism in the face of political and religious dogmatism, and of spurious appeals to national unity for the common good. I’ll doggedly stick to it.

So will I, even though in the short run the probability of a socially liberal, economically responsible government emerging from our next election looks to be half of five eighths of sod all.