A way to reduce housing costs

The Government is keen to reduce costs. Eric Crampton has a way they can do this:

Donal Curtin pointed to some less-than-helpful government action that helps increase construction costs. New Zealand initiated anti-dumping action against Chinese wire nails, Malaysian galvanised wire, and Thai plasterboard, among other things. And so we have a specific tariff helping to keep prices up for plasterboard. While we're trying to rebuild after an .

So one part of central government is all mad about excessive construction costs. Another part of central government penalises foreigners for selling us construction materials cheaply.

It's a fair point. If foreigners want to dump cheap materials on us, let's take advantage of it!

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