Planning for affordability
Wellington City’s Draft Spatial Plan, currently out for consultation, asks where the city might find room for another 50-80,000 people over the next thirty years. The challenge is bigger than that. Read more
Eric is the Chief Economist at The New Zealand Initiative. With the Initiative, he has worked in policy areas ranging from freshwater management to policy for earthquake preparedness, and from local government to technology policy. He has recently focused on policy related to Covid-19 response. He served as Lecturer and Senior Lecturer in Economics at the Department of Economics & Finance at the University of Canterbury from 2003 through 2014.
Eric’s columns and commentary appear regularly in New Zealand’s major media outlets, as well as on his blog, Offsetting Behaviour. He can also be found on Twitter at @ericcrampton .
Submission: Transforming Recycling - Container Return Scheme (2022)
Submission: Wellington Council on the Draft Economic Wellbeing Strategy (2022)
Submission: Managing exotic afforestation incentives (2022)
Submission: The market study into residential building supplies preliminary issues paper (2022)
Submission: Issues raised at the consultation conference on the Commission's market study into the retail grocery sector draft report (2021)
Submission: Resource management enabling housing supply and other matters Amendment Bill (2021)
Submission: Covid-19 public health response Amendment Bill (no 2) (2021)
Research Note: Safer arrivals and the path to 2022 (2021)
Submission: The market study into the retail grocery sector draft report (2021)
Fording the rapids: Charting a course to fresher water (2021)
Submission: Proposals for a smokefree Aotearoa 2025 action plan (2021)
Submission: Inquiry into congestion pricing in Auckland (2021)
Policy Point: A risky place to do business (2021)
Roadmap for Recovery: Briefing to the Incoming Government (2020)
Submission: Smokefree environments and regulated products Act 1990: Proposals for regulations (2021)
Democracy in the Dark (2020)
Research Note: Safe Arrivals (2020)
Policy Point: Open for minds: export education and recovery (2020)
Submission: Smokefree environments and regulated products (vaping) Amendment Bill (2020)
Policy Point: Stay on Target (2020)
Research Note: Effective Treatment: Public policy prescription for a pandemic (2020)
Policy Point: Time to process (2020)
Scroll down to read the rest of Eric's work.
Phone: +64 4 499 0790
Wellington City’s Draft Spatial Plan, currently out for consultation, asks where the city might find room for another 50-80,000 people over the next thirty years. The challenge is bigger than that. Read more
Voting is not a duty. But if you do vote, you should vote well. Read more
The real fun in Treasury fiscal updates is rarely in the headlines. It’s rather in the finer print where the assumptions underpinning the main estimates are laid out, and where different scenarios are played out. Read more
Treasury’s pre-election fiscal update makes for grim reading. Bryce Wilkinson tallies the numbers, showing the forecasts are based on heroic projections about growth in labour productivity and on greater fiscal discipline than has been the norm. Read more
Last week, National proposed a series of policies to increase the uptake of electric vehicles. Suppose it works exactly as promised and the number of electric vehicles quadruples in the next three years. Read more
In this week’s New Zealand Initiative podcast, a new report on the state of civics knowledge in New Zealand reveals Kiwis have a bit of work to do before the election next month. Simply put, New Zealanders don’t know how lucky they are that their government works so well even though they don’t know much about it. Read more
Last week’s UNICEF report on child wellbeing gets one big thing very right. Important parts of government policy are failing children. Read more
Our new report Democracy in the Dark shows that almost a third of New Zealanders cannot name the political parties currently in parliament. Less than half of the one thousand people surveyed understood how New Zealand's political system MMP, works. Read more
How much of what Kiwi voters should know about democracy do they really know? Our Chief Economist Eric Crampton discusses the results of our new report on the state of civic knowledge in New Zealand on TVNZ Breakfast. Read more
Eric Crampton talks to Duncan Garner on The AM Show about our survey that shows a shocking lack of civics knowledge amongst New Zealanders. He says it is hard to vote well if you don't know the basics. Read more
Are Kiwis taking their civics for granted? American columnist H.L. Read more
It wasn’t that long after the Christchurch earthquakes that the calls for rent control came. The earthquakes had destroyed thousands and thousands of homes. Read more
If we take one overarching political lesson from the Government’s “shovel-ready” spending fiasco and the school of environmental voodoo, it’s this: Principles are dangerous things. It’s best not to have them. Read more
Cartography geeks might remember the isochronic maps of the late 19th and early 20th century. Covid’s time-warp is making them relevant again, and possibly for rather longer than we might hope. Read more
While the Government works to plug the gaps to help achieve its elimination strategy, opposition political party National has released its own high-level policy for border protection. It is light on the details so far, but chief economist Eric Crampton says it sets out a workable framework which is worth adding to the pool of ideas for what to do about the border. Read more