NZ Economics Forum

Last week's 2021 NZ Economics Forum at Waikato University was rather good, and the whole thing was livestreamed. 

You can catch video replays of the talks here. 

I particularly recommend:

• John Gibson going through how differences in economic structure (like the size of the service sector) affected economic performance through the pandemic;
• Alan Bollard on difficulties of getting infrastructure built under current consenting rules;
• My colleague Matt Burgess on the merits of the Emissions Trading Scheme;
• Sharon Zollner on the economic state of play and risks inherent in growing leverage.
• Bill English's after-dinner talk was absolutely superb, but was not recorded. Sorry. 

The talks I haven't linked haven't yet been broken out by the conference organisers; they're in the full-day video. 

There are a few more that you might want to catch because they give a worrying insight into what's going on in some of the agencies:

• MBIE Chief Economist Donna Purdue is rather taken with Mariana Mazzucato's vision of an entrepreneurial state. Here's Alberto Mingardi's critique of that work. Here's Deirdre McCloskey's book on it with Alberto Mingardi. Here's McCloskey and Mingardi's column on their book. The Ministry of Everything seems to want to be the Ministry of Everything. It's a worry. 
• Vicky Robertson from MfE on their take on Net Zero. Unfortunately, her video link in from Wellington was shaky, so she was unable to answer my question about whether they've looked at all at carbon dividends instead of tacking a pile of regulatory measures on top of the ETS.

The panel session I was in is here:

Kudos to the conference organisers. Academic conferences are often a bit of a shambles as compared to corporate ones, but this one wasn't - despite changing alert levels and consequent shifts to some presentations by Zoom.