The budget's imposed a customs levy on air travellers to cover the costs of biosecurity border enforcement. Michael makes the simple Coasean point:
It's a bit beyond that. Somebody bringing hoof and mouth disease into the country would do rather more harm. But the simple Coasean point is that it takes two to make an externality. Either the agricultural sector will impose an external cost on the tourist sector, or vice versa. It isn't obvious which side of the ledger ought to bear the burden.
- A new tax on international travel. I wonder if the government looked at the possibility of levying these costs on, for example, the apple and kiwifruit industries, for whose benefit most of the biosecurity apparatus seems to exist? Are those industries really economic?
The rest of his post on the budget is well worth reading, as is his follow-up. I especially liked this potted history in the latter post:
The previous government in many ways deserves a lot of credit for keeping spending in check for their first six years, but the structural surplus in 2006 peaked at 4.7 per cent of GDP (OECD estimate). Those huge surpluses just set up an electoral auction in the 2005 election campaign. No political party will ever want to be in the position of allowing their opposition to spend the surplus their way – those choices, about priorities, are a large part of what politics is about. And the large surpluses built up in the early 2000s didn’t even do much to ease pressure on monetary policy, because they were run up well before the peak pressures on resources (2005 to 2008). Quite possibly, overall macroeconomic management in New Zealand over the last 15 years would have been a little better if piecemeal adjustments had been made throughout. We’d never have got into a position where we had highly stimulatory discretionary fiscal policy in the period (2005-2007) of greatest pressure on resources (and on the exchange rate). And it would also have avoided a situation where Treasury, applying its best professional judgement, finally determined only just before the great recession of 2008/09 that the revenue increases looked permanent. A high stakes judgement that turned out to be quite wrong. Fiscal institutions, and ambitions, need to take more serious account of the severe limits of anyone’s knowledge. A Fiscal Council, as the New Zealand Initiative and the former director of the IMF’s Fiscal Affairs Department have recently called for, might explore some of these issues. Or a Macroeconomic Council might? Then again, our academics and think tanks might lead such debates.The best case we can make for yesterday's budget is that it bought the government time to undertake the more substantial reforms to the benefits system behind the scenes: pushing towards outcome-based contracting, outsourcing service provision, running innovative experiments like Tamaki.
Maybe my expectations have been too high. Under the government's budgetary projections, conditional on continued fiscal discipline, by 2018 government spending as a fraction of GDP will be back to where it was in 2004 under Helen Clark. In 2008, I'd have been very happy for government spending to ever return to 2004 levels. So there's that. Conditional on continued fiscal discipline.
