Between 1988 and 2013 New Zealand’s tax and welfare systems have experienced a significant period of change, with real benefit payments and tax rates both declining. When evaluating the perceived fairness of these reforms ...

The purpose of this essay is to address the question: “Are there elements of Phillip's work that are still relevant today for macroeconomic policymaking today?” In undertaking this task, I will draw on the summary of his ...

Jenkins and Lambert (1997) demonstrated that a number of measures of poverty could be combined and compared using the "Three Is of Poverty" (TIP) curve; the ‘three Is’ being the incidence, intensity and inequality of ...

This paper explores poverty income dynamics in the form of income mobility by the poor and poverty persistence, making use of simple diagrams. It seeks to illustrate (a) the extent to which income mobility is pro-poor; and ...

Considerable attention is currently being paid to establishing the extent of inequality in New Zealand and whether it has risen in recent years. This paper offers some insights into the inequality measures and interpretations ...

This paper illustrates the effects of using different distributions and summary measures, using New Zealand data for the period 2007 to 2011. Using an annual accounting period, alternative welfare metrics and units of ...

This paper considers the use of alternative welfare metrics in evaluations of income inequality in a multi-period context. Using Norwegian longitudinal income data, it is found, as in many studies, that inequality is lower ...

This paper explores, in the context of the Atkinson inequality measure, attempts to make interpretations of orders of magnitude transparent. One suggestion is that the analogy of sharing a cake among a very small number ...

Performance-based research quality measures have been adopted in many countries as a basis for allocating funding to universities. The question arises of whether this produces a divergence of research quality across ...

This paper examines the simulated labour supply responses to the personal tax and transfer policy changes introduced in New Zealand in 2010, and the implications for revenue and income distribution. The main changes examined ...