Roger to Deborah

Roger Kerr blogs:

Deborah Hill Cone is one of my favourite journalists.

Her cosmopolitan reading habits are unique in the New Zealand media, and she’s generally no slouch in business and economic commentary either.

But she must have got out on the wrong side of the bed the day she wrote ‘Dream of success keeps slipping away’ (New Zealand Herald, October 22, 2010).

She wrote that New Zealand is losing its place in the international league tables and that nothing we have done has made a jot of difference.

A reading of yesterday’s 2025 Taskforce report will cheer her up.  It confirms – see the graph on p4 – that New Zealand kept pace with the average per capita growth rate of the OECD as a whole following the earlier economic reforms, only falling away in the last years of the 1999-2008 Labour government.  In other words, the long-term decline relative to the OECD was arrested (although Australia did a bit better).  OECD projections suggest that New Zealand will outperform the OECD average to 2025.

Polices do make a difference. I have not had time to go through the 2025 taskforce policies in depth but may get time next week to do so.