Wages and the Poor by Brian Easton

$12.00 NZD

Category: New Zealand | Reading Level: very good

The New Zealand Experiment - A World Model for Structural Adjustment by Jane Kelsey

$25.00 NZD

Category: History | Reading Level: very good

The Commercialisation of New Zealand by Brian Easton

$20.00 NZD

Category: New Zealand | Reading Level: near fine

This text examines the origins, theory, history and politics of the dramatic change in economic policy in New Zealand, from Robert Muldoon's interventionalism to Roger Douglas's commercialization. It is illustrated with case studies including broadcasting, cultural policy, education, environment and her itage, the system of government, health, the labor market and science. ...Show more

Alternating Currents or Counter-Revolution?: Contemporary Electricity Reform in New Zealand by Lewis T. Evans and Richard B. Meade

$35.00 NZD

Category: New Zealand | Reading Level: near fine

Lewis T. Evans and Richard B. Meade place New Zealand’s current institutional arrangements for its electricity sector within the context of successive waves of economic reform. They compare these arrangements with developments internationally, drawing together lessons for future policymaking both i n New Zealand and overseas. Alternating Currents or Counter-Revolutioni is a work of political economy – and the book carefully analyses the interplay between technology, economics and politics that has at different times driven the sector. Controversially, the authors argue that the market reforms of the 1980s and 1990s provided greater supply security than the more centralised arrangements prevailing in the past – and that New Zealand’s reversion to more centralised and political control since the late 1990s has resulted in an unsustainable half-way house that hinders private electricity investments and reinforces this trend. First published March 2006. The authors Lewis T. Evans is a professor of economics at Victoria University of Wellington and was the first executive director of the New Zealand Institute for the Study of Competition and Regulation Inc (ISCR). He is a senior consultant for Charles River Associates (Asia Pacific) Limited. At ISCR he supervised research into aspects of the New Zealand electricity industry. Richard B. Meade is a research principal of ISCR, and as principal of Cognitus Advisory Services Limited advises clients on strategic and analytical problems drawing on the tools of economics, corporate finance and quantitative analysis. He also lectures in corporate finance, corporate governance and Maori/tribal governance at Victoria University of Wellington. ...Show more

Markets and States in Tropical Africa - The Political Basis of Agricultural Policies by Robert H. Bates

$10.00 NZD

Category: Africa | Reading Level: good

Following independence, most countries in Africa sought to develop, but their governments pursued policies that actually undermined their rural economies. Examining the origins of Africa's "growth tragedy," Markets and States in Tropical Africa has for decades shaped the thinking of practitioners and sc holars alike. Robert H. Bates's analysis now faces a challenge, however: the revival of economic growth on the continent. In this edition, Bates provides a new preface and chapter that address the seeds of Africa's recovery and discuss the significance of the continent's success for the arguments of this classic work. ...Show more

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Professor Daron Acemoglu (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

$12.00 NZD

Category: Economics | Reading Level: very good

"Brilliant and engagingly written, " Why Nations Fail "answers the question that has stumped the experts for centuries: Why are some nations rich and others poor, divided by wealth and poverty, health and sickness, food and famine? "Is it culture, the weather, geography? Perhaps ignorance of what the ri ght policies are? Simply, no. None of these factors is either definitive or destiny. Otherwise, how to explain why Botswana has become one of the fastest growing countries in the world, while other African nations, such as Zimbabwe, the Congo, and Sierra Leone, are mired in poverty and violence? Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson conclusively show that it is man-made political and economic institutions that underlie economic success (or lack of it). Korea, to take just one of their fascinating examples, is a remarkably homogeneous nation, yet the people of North Korea are among the poorest on earth while their brothers and sisters in South Korea are among the richest. The south forged a society that created incentives, rewarded innovation, and allowed everyone to participate in economic opportunities. The economic success thus spurred was sustained because the government became accountable and responsive to citizens and the great mass of people. Sadly, the people of the north have endured decades of famine, political repression, and very different economic institutions--with no end in sight. The differences between the Koreas is due to the politics that created these completely different institutional trajectories. Based on fifteen years of original research Acemoglu and Robinson marshall extraordinary historical evidence from the Roman Empire, the Mayan city-states, medieval Venice, the Soviet Union, Latin America, England, Europe, the United States, and Africa to build a new theory of political economy with great relevance for the big questions of today, including: - China has built an authoritarian growth machine. Will it continue to grow at such high speed and overwhelm the West? - Are America's best days behind it? Are we moving from a virtuous circle in which efforts by elites to aggrandize power are resisted to a vicious one that enriches and empowers a small minority? - What is the most effective way to help move billions of people from the rut of poverty to prosperity? More philanthropy from the wealthy nations of the West? Or learning the hard-won lessons of Acemoglu and Robinson's breakthrough ideas on the interplay between inclusive political and economic institutions? "Why Nations Fail "will change the way you look at--and understand--the world. ...Show more

Double Entry by Jane Gleeson-White

$10.00 NZD

Category: Economics | Reading Level: good

How the merchants of Venice shaped the modern world - and how their invention could make or break the planet. A fascinating exploration of how a simple system used to measure and record wealth spawned a cultural revolution. Prepare to have your idea of accounting changed forever. 'The rise and metamor phosis of double-entry bookkeeping is one of history's best-kept secrets and most important untold tales ... Through its logic we have let the planet go to ruin-and through its logic we now have a chance to avert that ruin.' Our world is governed by the numbers generated by the accounts of nations and corporations. We depend on these numbers to direct our governments, organisations, economies, societies. But where did they come from-and how did they become so powerful?The answer to these questions begins in the Dark Ages, with the emergence in northern Italy of a new form of accounting called double-entry bookkeeping. The story of double entry reaches from the Crusades through the Renaissance to the factories of industrial Britain and the policymakers of the Great Depression and the Second World War. At its heart stands a Renaissance monk, mathematician and magician, and his celebrated treatise for merchants. With double entry came the wealth and cultural efflorescence that was the Renaissance, a new scientific worldview, and a new economic system: capitalism.Over the past one hundred years accounting has flourished to an astonishing degree, despite the many scandals it has left in its wake. The figures double entry generates have become a sophisticated system of numbers which in the twenty-first century rules the global economy, manipulated by governments, financial institutions and the quant nerds of Wall Street.And the story of double entry is still unfolding-because today it might be our last hope for life on earth. ...Show more

The FIRE Economy by Jane Kelsey

$25.00 NZD

Category: Economics | Reading Level: very good

The FIRE economy – finance, insurance and real estate – is now the world’s principal source of wealth creation. Its rise has transformed our political, economic and social landscapes. From rising inequality and ballooning household debt to a global financial crisis and fiscal austerity , instability has accompanied this new orthodoxy. Yet it has proven remarkably resilient, even resurgent, in New Zealand and abroad. Examining the FIRE economy takes Jane Kelsey back to her bestselling account of the neoliberal revolution, The New Zealand Experiment. The systematic transfer of power first detailed in that groundbreaking work is shown to have advanced, embedding neoliberalism in New Zealand. The FIRE economy is sustained by the norms, rules and institutions of this new orthodoxy – a complex web of global finance, light regulation, debt, risk tolerance and property bubbles. The continuing narrative of neoliberalism in New Zealand reveals financial crises to be inherent to the very structure of the FIRE economy. How we respond to New Zealand’s future crises, however, means questioning what responses the failing neoliberal orthodoxy will actually permit. In detailing the barriers the FIRE economy presents to change in New Zealand, Kelsey points towards socially progressive, post-neoliberal futures. ...Show more

Death by a Thousand Cuts: The Fight over Taxing Inherited Wealth by Michael J. Graetz; I. Shapiro

$30.00 NZD

Category: Economics | Reading Level: very good

This fast-paced book by Yale professors Michael Graetz and Ian Shapiro unravels the following mystery: How is it that the estate tax, which has been on the books continuously since 1916 and is paid by only the wealthiest two percent of Americans, was repealed in 2001 with broad bipartisan support? The m ystery is all the more striking because the repeal was not done in the dead of night, like a congressional pay raise. It came at the end of a multiyear populist campaign launched by a few individuals, and was heralded by its supporters as a signal achievement for Americans who are committed to the work ethic and the American Dream. Graetz and Shapiro conducted wide-ranging interviews with the relevant players: members of congress, senators, staffers from the key committees and the Bush White House, civil servants, think tank and interest group representatives, and many others. The result is a unique portrait of American politics as viewed through the lens of the death tax repeal saga. Graetz and Shapiro brilliantly illuminate the repeal campaign's many fascinating and unexpected turns--particularly the odd end result whereby the repeal is slated to self-destruct a decade after its passage. They show that the stakes in this fight are exceedingly high; the very survival of the long standing American consensus on progressive taxation is being threatened. Graetz and Shapiro's rich narrative reads more like a political drama than a conventional work of scholarship. Yet every page is suffused by their intimate knowledge of the history of the tax code, the transformation of American conservatism over the past three decades, and the wider political implications of battles over tax policy. ...Show more

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt

$12.00 NZD

Category: Economics | Reading Level: good

In Freakonomics Steven Levitt asks a series of provocative and profound questions about contemporary living and helps us to see the familiar world through a completely original lens. He examines everything from education to traffic jams, from food to guns, from sports to getting elected, from betting to parenting, pushing back the boundaries of economics along the way. Levitt turns conventional economics on its head, stripping away the jargon and calculations of the ‘experts’ to explore the riddles of everyday life. He reaches some astonishing conclusions, showing us that Freakonomics is all about how people get what they want. Anyone living in the United States in the early 1990s and paying even a whisper of attention to the nightly news or a daily paper could be forgiven for having been scared out of his skin. The culprit was crime. It had been rising relentlessly—a graph plotting the crime rate in any American city over recent decades looked like a ski slope in profile—and it seemed now to herald the end of the world as we knew it. Death by gunfire, intentional and otherwise, had become commonplace. So too had carjacking and crack dealing, robbery and rape. Violent crime was a gruesome, constant companion. And things were about to get even worse. Much worse. All the experts were saying so. The cause was the so-called superpredator. For a time, he was everywhere. Glowering from the cover of newsweeklies. Swaggering his way through foot-thick government reports. He was a scrawny, big-city teenager with a cheap gun in his hand and nothing in his heart but ruthlessness. There were thousands out there just like him, we were told, a generation of killers about to hurl the country into deepest chaos. In 1995 the criminologist James Alan Fox wrote a report for the U.S. attorney general that grimly detailed the coming spike in murders by teenagers. Fox proposed optimistic and pessimistic scenarios. In the optimistic scenario, he believed, the rate of teen homicides would rise another 15 percent over the next decade; in the pessimistic scenario, it would more than double. ‘The next crime wave will get so bad,’ he said, ‘that it will make 1995 look like the good old days.’ Other criminologists, political scientists, and similarly learned forecasters laid out the same horrible future, as did President Clinton. ‘We know we've got about six years to turn this juvenile crime thing around,’ Clinton said, ‘or our country is going to be living with chaos. And my successors will not be giving speeches about the wonderful opportunities of the global economy; they'll be trying to keep body and soul together for people on the streets of these cities.’ The smart money was plainly on the criminals. And then, instead of going up and up and up, crime began to fall. And fall and fall and fall some more. The crime drop was startling in several respects. It was ubiquitous, with every category of crime falling in every part of the country. It was persistent, with incremental decreases year after year. And it was entirely unanticipated—especially by the very experts who had been predicting the opposite. The magnitude of the reversal was astounding. The teenage murder rate, instead of rising 100 percent or even 15 percent as James Alan Fox had warned, fell more than 50 percent within five years. By 2000 the overall murder rate in the United States had dropped to its lowest level in thirty-five years. So had the rate of just about every other sort of crime, from assault to car theft. Even though the experts had failed to anticipate the crime drop— which was in fact well under way even as they made their horrifying predictions—they now hurried to explain it. Most of their theories sounded perfectly logical. It was the roaring 1990s economy, they said, that helped turn back crime. It was the proliferation of gun control laws, they said. It was the sort of innovative policing strategies put into place in New York City, where murders would fall from 2,245 in 1990 to 596 in 2003. These theories were not only logical; they were also encouraging, for they attributed the crime drop to specific and recent human initiatives. If it was gun control and clever police strategies and better-paying jobs that quelled crime—well then, the power to stop criminals had been within our reach all along. As it would be the next time, God forbid, that crime got so bad. These theories made their way, seemingly without question, from the experts' mouths to journalists' ears to the public's mind. In short course, they became conventional wisdom. There was only one problem: they weren't true. There was another factor, meanwhile, that had greatly contributed to the massive crime drop of the 1990s. It had taken shape more than twenty years earlier and concerned a young woman in Dallas named Norma McCorvey. Like the proverbial butterfly that flaps its wings on one continent and eventually causes a hurricane on another, Norma McCorvey dramatically altered the course of events without intending to. All she had wanted was an abortion. She was a poor, uneducated, unskilled, alcoholic, drug-using twenty-one-year-old woman who had already given up two children for adoption and now, in 1970, found herself pregnant again. But in Texas, as in all but a few states at that time, abortion was illegal. McCorvey’s cause came to be adopted by people far more powerful than she. They made her the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit seeking to legalize abortion. The defendant was Henry Wade, the Dallas County district attorney. The case ultimately made it to the U.S. Supreme Court, by which time McCorvey’s name had been disguised as Jane Roe. On January 22, 1973, the court ruled in favor of Ms. Roe, allowing legalized abortion throughout the country. By this time, of course, it was far too late for Ms. McCorvey/Roe to have her abortion. She had given birth and put the child up for adoption. (Years later she would renounce her allegiance to legalized abortion and become a pro-life activist.) So how did Roe v. Wade help trigger, a generation later, the greatest crime drop in recorded history? As far as crime is concerned, it turns out that not all children are born equal. Not even close. Decades of studies have shown that a child born into an adverse family environment is far more likely than other children to become a criminal. And the millions of women most likely to have an abortion in the wake of Roe v. Wade—poor, unmarried, and teenage mothers for whom illegal abortions had been too expensive or too hard to get—were often models of adversity. They were the very women whose children, if born, would have been much more likely than average to become criminals. But because of Roe v. Wade, these children weren't being born. This powerful cause would have a drastic, distant effect: years later, just as these unborn children would have entered their criminal primes, the rate of crime began to plummet. It wasn't gun control or a strong economy or new police strategies that finally blunted the American crime wave. It was, among other factors, the reality that the pool of potential criminals had dramatically shrunk. Now, as the crime-drop experts (the former crime doomsayers) spun their theories to the media, how many times did they cite legalized abortion as a cause? Zero. First published 2005. ...Show more

Eco-Economy: Building an Economy for the Earth by Lester R. Brown

$16.00 NZD

Category: Economics | Reading Level: very good

In 1543, Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus challenged the view that the Sun revolved around the Earth, arguing instead that the Earth revolved around the Sun. His paper led to a revolution in thinking--to a new worldview. Eco-Economy discusses the need today for a similar shift in our worldview. The issue now is whether the environment is part of the economy or the economy is part of the environment. Lester R. Brown argues the latter, pointing out that treating the environment as part of the economy has produced an economy that is destroying its natural support systems. Brown notes that if China were to have a car in every garage, American style, it would need 80 million barrels of oil a day--more than the world currently produces. If paper consumption per person in China were to reach the U.S. level, China would need more paper than the world produces. There go the world's forests. If the fossil fuel-based, automobile-centered, throwaway economic model will not work for China, it will not work for the other 3 billion people in the developing world--and it will not work for the rest of the world. But Brown is optimistic as he describes how to restructure the global economy to make it compatible with the Earth's ecosystem so that economic progress can continue. In the new economy, wind farms replace coal mines, hydrogen-powered fuel cells replace internal combustion engines, and cities are designed for people, not cars. Glimpses of the new economy can be seen in the wind farms of Denmark, the solar rooftops of Japan, and the bicycle network of the Netherlands. Eco-Economy is a road map of how to get from here to there. ...Show more

Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy by Hazel Henderson

$14.00 NZD

Category: Economics | Reading Level: very good

With insight, clarity, warmth and enthusiasm, Hazel Henderson announces the mature presence of the green economy. Mainstream media and big business interests have sidelined its emergence and evolution, but it is now a significant and rapidly growing sector. Throughout Ethical Markets Henderson weaves st atistics and analysis with profiles of entrepreneurs, environmentalists, scientists, and professionals. Based on interviews conducted on her longstanding US public television series, these profiles celebrate those who have led the highly successful growth of green businesses around the world. Ethical Markets is the ultimate sourcebook on today's thriving green economy. ...Show more