Various media last weekend (I think this was the first) latched onto a chart in the OECD’s latest Employment Outlook publication which appeared to show that over the last five years New Zealand real wages had not only fallen sharply (down 6.4 per cent) but by more than any other OECD country.

Since then the line has popped up repeatedly in columns and other commentaries (when I looked a few days ago a former Prime Minister’s tweet on the matter had been retweeted 140 times).

Within hours of the first stories appearing various economists, including me, pointed out that the OECD appeared to have used the wrong data for New Zealand, and that if better series were used, New Zealand would have been much more in the middle of the pack (assuming data for the other countries was generally representative). Wage growth comparisons across countries are often fraught because different countries measure things that might sound the same in somewhat different ways.

A few days ago The Post invited me to write a piece for publication on the issue. There is a link here to the online version, but I’ve also included the text at the end of this post.

What went wrong is best captured in this chart which I ran on Twitter several days ago

The OECD used the grey line (the LCI) even though it (by design) is not a measure of wage rates received by workers at all (it adjust for improvements in performance, so that eg over time economy.wide improvements in productivity will tend to flow into wages but should, in principle, end up largely netted off in the LCI). As you can see, over 30+ years of data the real LCI has hardly changed at all (but having increased for a few years it did actually fall 6.4 per cent over the last five years).

There is no ideal measure of real wages, but a much better starting point is provided by either the LCI Analytical Unadjusted series (blue line) or the QES average ordinary time hourly earnings. As you can see, both series increased strongly over the 25 years pre-Covid (broadly speaking reflective of improvements in economywide productivity and terms of trade over that period).

Here is what those two series look like for the period since the end of 2019, just prior to Covid.

As the OECD did, I’ve deflated both series by increases in the CPI. Then, whether one focuses (as the OECD did) on just the last five years or (as seems more meaningful) over the period just prior to Covid, real wages over the full period have either been flat or have increased a bit. Any improvement in real wages hasn’t been large, but then (as in most countries) the period since Covid began hasn’t been a particularly good one economically. (And perhaps it is worth noting that real wages did fall when the unexpected large outbreak of inflation hit, enabled by poor Reserve Bank monetary policy judgements. But that unexpected lost ground has since been regained.)

Here it is perhaps also worth noting that nothing about my comments here is partisan. It wasn’t the politicians’ fault that the Reserve Bank (like many of its peers) got it wrong, and it isn’t obvious that trend productivity growth is any better now.

When I say the economy hasn’t performed well this is the sort of chart I have in mind.

Since 2019Q4, real GDP per capita has increased by only 3.5 per cent (over more than six years). It isn’t surprising that real wages haven’t increased much (if at all). But it would be very surprising indeed had real wages fallen to anything like the extent the OECD was claiming.

As another cross-check, I took a look at SNZ’s breakdown of nominal GDP, and in particular at the wages (“compensation of employees”) share. It was thrown all over the place by Covid (you can see the extreme June quarter 2020 spike, with the first wage subsidy and the most intensive lockdown), but over the full period since 2019Q4 compensation of employees has barely changed as a share of GDP (marginally down, but then the employment/population ratio has also fallen a bit).

Finally, in some of my initial comments I suggested that, in principle, the LCI was a bit like a measure of Unit Labour Costs. A few people asked if the OECD was intending to use ULC data in its chart, which seemed very unlikely (because they have well-labelled series of their own estimates of ULCs) and, in any case, was at odds with the footnotes on the table behind the OECD chart). In principle, Unit Labour Costs measures the effective cost to employers of labour, adjusting for productivity growth (and thus, one of the OECD’s real exchange rate series is a measure using relative unit labour costs across countries). The series doesn’t get a lot of attention but, for what it is worth, here is what the OECD’s unit labour cost series deflated by the CPI looks like for New Zealand over the last 30 years.

I wouldn’t put much weight on it myself, but at very least it is inconsistent with any sort of narrative about employers profiting at the expense of workers.

None of this is cause for any complacency. New Zealand’s economic performance, under successive governments, has been poor to mediocre for decades (probably at least back to 1950), with gaps opening up to the rest of the advanced world. In absolute terms things have worsened (as in so many countries) in recent years, with little average real income growth. But it is simply nothing like as bad (in absolute terms or – almost certainly – in relative ones) as the OECD made out.

OECD cross-country comparisons can often be very useful. But when a number – in any publication – looks particularly interesting it is always worth stopping and checking whether it is really showing (meaningfully) what it purports to show.

Real wages haven’t fallen 6 per cent

Michael Reddell

Michael Reddell is an economic commentator and former Reserve Bank and Treasury official

Last week the Paris-based OECD released its annual Employment Outlook report.  It is a long and often rather dry report, 400 pages long and 130 charts.   But just the thing for labour market nerds to pore over on a wet Saturday afternoon.

One chart in that report caught the eye of New Zealand journalists, leading to a succession of stories and columns claiming  – with the authority of the OECD –  that New Zealand real wages (i.e. after adjusting for CPI inflation) had fallen by 6.4 per cent in the last five years, more than in any other OECD country.   

Within hours of the first story appearing various economists pointed out that the OECD appeared to have used the wrong data for New Zealand.   If more appropriate data series had been used, the New Zealand experience would have looked much more middle-of-the-pack.   But that hasn’t stopped the story running this week.    Real wages in New Zealand, we have been told again and again, have plummeted, and we have done particularly poorly.  That simply isn’t so.  

So what went wrong?  In their chart, the OECD used data from the Labour Cost Index (LCI).  That might sound like a measure of wage rates but (and by design) it isn’t.   Instead, the LCI tries to measure wage costs after adjusting for various things, but particularly for any improvement in the performance of employees.  Over time, if labour productivity improves actual wage rates will tend to increase but the Labour Cost Index won’t.   For some purposes it can be a useful index (e.g. for analysts looking at whether higher wage increases might put pressure on inflation, which they shouldn’t if productivity is rising too).  But it simply isn’t useful as a measure of what is happening to the purchasing power of workers’ wages. 

For that purpose, there are two other series.  The first, less well known, is the Labour Cost Index – Analytical Unadjusted.  That is an ungainly mouthful of a label, but Statistics New Zealand itself describes this series as providing “a more comprehensive picture of wage changes”.   Like the LCI it is a stratified index  –  one not thrown around by compositional changes – but it doesn’t seek to adjust out things like improvements in performance and productivity.   It isn’t a perfect measure, but for these purposes it is a lot more relevant than the headline LCI.

And then there is the simple measure of average ordinary time hourly earnings, taken from the Quarterly Employment Survey.  It isn’t really a proper index at all, and it is thrown around by compositional changes (e.g. in downturns young people and lower-skilled people are relatively more likely to be out of work).   But it is a measure of what was paid to people who were in work, and so has a certain appeal of simplicity. 

To get at real wages we have to adjust for inflation.  Once we do so, both these measures have increased substantially over the decades.  In the chart, I’ve just shown them starting from just prior to Covid.  As it happens, whether one looks just at the five years since March 2021 (as the OECD chart did) or at the entire period since 2019, the picture is much the same.  Real wages dipped when the surprisingly severe outbreak of inflation hit later in 2021 and 2022, but they recovered and over the full period real wages have either been flat or have increased a bit.   That isn’t a great performance at all – few economies have done particularly well in recent years – but it would have put us more in the middle of the pack in that OECD chart. 

Quite why the OECD appears to have stuffed up on this occasion isn’t clear.  It probably doesn’t help that Statistics New Zealand typically gives high profile coverage in their releases to the LCI, and buries the Analytical Unadjusted series well down the page.  As for why the misleading comparisons have continued to be reported, that is probably down to some mix of, on the one hand, the OECD usually being a good source for cross-country data, and on the other, the “biggest fall in real wages in the OECD” sounds like a good headline (perhaps especially in election year).

There is an old cautionary adage that if a number appears particularly interesting it is probably wrong.   In this case, the LCI was simply the wrong measure for the purposes of what the OECD was trying to illustrate.    It is easy to be gloomy about New Zealand’s long-term economic performance, but not all statistics that look tantalizingly bad will be capturing quite what users think they might be.   Always ask questions.  Always cross-check.

No, this is nothing to do with (say) Neil Quigley’s months-long spin and obfuscation from last year (eg here or here).

Decades ago, when the Commonwealth counted for more, the regular Finance Ministers’ meetings seemed to usually be held in some of the more exotic and picturesque of the member countries (these days, barely attracting any attention, they seem to be held in the margins of the IMF/World Bank annual meetings). The 1985 meeting was held in (then newly-admitted to the Commonwealth) the Maldives. New Zealand’s then Minister of Finance Roger Douglas attended.

In the mid 1980s one of the issues again wracking the Commonwealth was what to do about (former member) South Africa, still under the apartheid government that was reforming, if at all, very slowly indeed. In the late 70s there had been the Gleneagles agreement on sporting contacts but by the mid 80s economic pressure and possible sanctions (including forced divestment) were in view, and not just among Commonwealth countries. Pressure was building too on private sector firms and in 1985 a refusal by international banks to rollover South African government short-term foreign debt led to greatly intensified pressures.

The Commonwealth, of course, is and was a diverse grouping. Some member countries (New Zealand was one, but it was true of Caribbean member countries too) had almost no economic ties to South Africa. Others – small border states in particular – were very heavily dependent on South Africa (migrant labour remittances, access to imports etc). And UK firms collectively made up by far the largest source of foreign investment in South Africa. Getting any sort of common view was a challenge to say the least, even when all deplored the apartheid system and looked towards a future transition. The South African government and security forces were not known as soft touches. Neither, of course, was Margaret Thatcher.

The Commonwealth was never able to agree on any very serious package of economic sanctions, but just a few weeks after that Finance Ministers meeting, the Commonwealth Heads of Government, meeting in the Bahamas, did agree a fairly mild set of measures. A further round was adopted the following year. Probably like all sanctions policies, economic and political historians no doubt debate quite what role sanctions did, or might have had, in leading to the early 1990s transition.

Back in 1985, the then Reserve Bank Economic Adviser (until recently Chief Economist) Peter Nicholl took up a one-year IMF-sponsored secondment as Head of Economic Research to the central bank of the Seychelles, also an Indian Ocean Commonwealth member country. Peter tells the story thus:

One thing I did during the evenings and weekends there was write a political thriller called Sanctions in Paradise. It was set in the Seychelles so i didn’t have to make up the scenery, just observe it. There is a Commonwealth Finance Ministers’ Conference being held in Seychelles. I had attended a couple of those boring meetings so I knew how they were organized and run. The main item on the agenda was whether or not to impose economic sanctions on South Africa because of their apartheid policies. The idea of trying to write the story occurred to me when I read a report on a group of South African mercenaries led by Mad Mike Hoare that had flown into Seychelles three years before I went there to try and overthrow the government – they failed. But reading the report gave me the idea of the South Africans trying to disrupt the meeting.

Peter came back to the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, spent several years as Deputy Governor, then as Executive Director at the World Bank, before an eight-year IMF-sponsored stint as the first Governor of the Central Bank of Bosnia and Herzegovina. (He made an appearance on this blog last year, having written a column for his local newspaper in Cambridge on the Reserve Bank shambles.)

Peter’s email to me a few weeks ago went on

I only sent it to one publisher. I got a very nice letter back – but it was a rejection letter. I put the book aside. I then lost the computer it was on and forgot all about it. About 3 years ago my sister found a printed copy in a box of papers from my mother’s estate. My mother was a hoarder – fortunately for me in this instance. I thought that was an omen so I decided to get the book self-published.

He offered to send me a copy, in the hope that I might like it and give it a plug. Self-marketing isn’t always easy. He passed on a couple of enthusiastic comments from eminent economists, both of whom had “thoroughly enjoyed it”. one adding “I found your accounts of the different national positions on sanctions on South Africa to be fascinating and compelling. The plot was good, your knowledge of Commonwealth meetings was obviously first rate and your writing is really good” and the other suggesting it had been a great read and suggesting Peter write another book.

I’m quite a fan of political or spy thrillers, especially those written and set in bygone decades which capture some of the flavour of the times without the benefit of hindsight (on Tyler Cowen’s recommendation last year I devoured those, mostly from the 1930s, of English writer Eric Ambler).

Much of Peter’s book is written in the voice of a rather hapless Treasury secondee (doubling as the Minister’s speechwriter) in the office of the Minister of Finance, part of the small New Zealand party at the conference. Resemblances between the Minister of Finance character and Roger Douglas seem slight at best, but the PM does get a bit part and there might be a few more resemblances to David Lange there.

So what did I make of the book? It was pretty well plotted and so I enjoyed the story. Since the author knew both the local setting and the political setting (as he notes, he’d been to previous Commonwealth Finance Ministers meetings) there is quite a sense of authenticity about it. The political issues and tensions from the times were very real, and if I’m old enough to hazily remember them, younger readers might appreciate an undemanding dip into the political tensions of another time. And if the book seemed a little slow to get going (albeit there is a high-drama event on page 3), it gathers pace and ends with a plausible-enough plot twist that I really didn’t see coming. And while newly released, the circumstances of the writing, loss and recovery, mean it does treat real history as we live it – without the benefit of hindsight, knowing how things eventually turned out.

As a reviewer, I’d note that the plot was stronger than the character development – but then it is a political thriller, not claiming to be “literary fiction” – and the dialogue at times was a bit clunky. Oh, and in a few places an editor might have been helpful (I noted Peter slipped between talking of a Prime Minister and a President of South Africa – from 1984 it was President (P W Botha)). But, yes, it was an enjoyable read, and not at all bad for the price.

Yes, Peter sent me a free copy but it appears that you can buy it for $19.95 in paperback or $5.99 for the e-book. Orders appear to to be able to placed here although Peter suggested that anyone wanting to buy a copy could contact him direct at  peterwenicholl@yahoo.co.nz.

When I stopped regular blogging in December I wrote

This is one of those issues that has really got my goat. (There won’t be any other return to blogging, although if I make a submission to the government’s belated independent review of Covid-era monetary policy I might put a link to that in a post.)

It is a nice summer evening in Wellington and would be a good time to be at the beach but….well…Wellington City Council…

A month or so ago the new Governor of the Reserve Bank signed up to a public statement by a group of several other central banks (ECB, BOE, RBA, Riksbank etc) in support of the outgoing Fed chair, Jerome Powell, following his revelations of what appeared to be an attempt to intimidate him by Trump’s Department of Justice. Most of the world’s (operationally independent) central banks didn’t sign (14 central banks signed up, and among those who didn’t were – from among advanced countries – central banks of Japan, Israel, Czech Republic, Poland, and Chile). Nor, of course, did the non-independent central banks from advanced countries (Singapore, Taiwan).

One can debate the substantive pros and cons of the statement (eg was it wise, helpful, accurate and so on). But that isn’t my focus here. One can also debate the best way for countries to respond to Trump (my own stance would be much more openly critical than our government’s own timid approach). But again not my focus here.

Instead my focus is on the Reserve Bank Governor’s approach and response.

Shortly after the news emerged that she had signed on to the statement (on 14 January) I OIA’ed the Bank (and the Minister) for all relevant material, including on (for example) invitations to join, consultation within the Bank, and consultation across other government agencies/ministers. An hour or two later, the Minister of Foreign Affairs Winston Peters had a go at Breman, noting that there had been no consultation with MFAT and strongly suggesting that the Governor needed to stay in her lane, suggesting that the Bank had operational independence in various domestic areas, but not to go trespassing across foreign policy, as a government agency.

(Personally, my initial scepticism about signing had to do with the credibility of the Reserve Bank itself – if you wanted good central bank governance and accountability you would certainly not have looked to the Reserve Bank of New Zealand over the last couple of years (budget busting, active misrepresentation by the outgoing board chair, repeated attempts to mislead Parliament, and finally the appointment of a new chair who’d been not only an active part of all that but had initially been appointed to the board when he had a clear conflict of interest. Oh, and a Minister of Finance who prevailed on the Bank to change its – independent – bank capital policies. Should anyone in the US administration have cared enough, a New Zealand signature would have looked laughably hypocritical (even if the new Governor might have good intentions.)

As it happens, in this particular saga documents released today suggest that, for all his other faults, the Board chair was one of the adults in the room.

You may recall that the Governor claimed that she was under real time pressure to sign up to the statement (at an on-line BIS meeting held from 1 to 3am that day). And, being the middle of the night, she didn’t feel she should bother the Minister of Finance (for example). The Minister of Finance has since made it pretty clear that the Governor should have felt free to have rung. The Prime Minister also weighed in with a gentle rap over the knuckles. And the Governor has apologised to both ministers (Finance and Foreign Affairs) for having gone ahead without consulting them (and/or their agencies).

When you listen to the Governor’s rhetoric one of the attractive dimensions is the claim that she wants a greater degree of transparency. That is welcome, but once again she does not walk the talk.

That OIA request of mine was lodged on 14 January. The Official Information Act requires agencies to respond as soon as reasonably practicable. The deadline for my request is tomorrow (the Bank probably envisaged sending it at 5pm on Friday). But this afternoon a 39 page release appeared silently (no press release or anything) on the pro-active releases page. I happened to spot it only because I was checking up something else. The 39 page document is presumably what they will tomorrow treat as the response to my OIA. Were they actually committed to transparency they could have put the lot out just a few days after the request was received (the release consists of a summary statement, a long set of letters from members of the public in support or opposed to the Governor’s decision to sign up, and a set of emails mostly among a few senior managers and board members, with no substantive redactions). But when bureaucrats tell you they are committed to transparency, mostly it is only for occasions when it suits them, and that is no accountability at all.

I’ll use the “Summary background statement” to frame all that follows, since it is the story the Governor has apparently chosen now to tell.

Which is fine, except all that it leaves out. What you would not know from this statement, or any comment from the Bank last month, is that the initial statement (9 central banks signing) had gone out a couple of hours before the BIS meeting (at 11:10pm New Zealand time). The ECB had it on its Twitter feed by 11:20pm

And, despite the Governor’s comment that “by the conclusion of the meeting, international reporting of the statement had begun”, in fact the WSJ’s chief economics correspondent had been tweeting about it by 12:22am

In this part of the world, the RBA had put the statement on its website at 12:30am NZ time

The statement had gone out, and was being reported on, before the 1am meeting even began.

There is no sign that the Governor or her staff were aware of any of this or (importantly) that they had even been invited to sign. My OIA request included any invitations to sign or correspondence with other central banks etc, and there is simply nothing of that sort in the response. The nine signatories will not have done so on the spur of the moment (there must have been exchanges over drafting, substance etc in at least the day prior to release, and probably at least some heads-ups within those individual central banks and perhaps to other government agencies/ministers. Some who were invited – one might guess the BoJ – apparently chose not to sign.)

Apparently (from the Governor’s email to her staff at 3:23 that morning) in the BIS meeting it had been indicated that any central bank that wanted to was free to sign. The Governor notes that “I..hope it is not too late” for them.

There is simply no basis for her claim that there was anything so pressing she needed to act immediately. The statement had gone out already, she hadn’t been invited….but perhaps she wanted to associate with the “cool kids” central banking club? Why would she still be seeking to mislead the public like that?

What of consultation?

It turns out that she consulted no one at all. Not senior staff, not the Board chair, not the ministers, not the Treasury or MFAT. We’d been told previously that she had informed Finlay. It wasn’t then clear whether that was before or after she signed (bearing in mind it was the middle of the night there may have been no practical difference if she’d just sent an email).

Here is the email, sent nine minutes after her email signing up.

Quite a few hours later the board chair Finlay gets back to her

You can tell he is not exactly impressed and, again, the Governor’s statement spins things in her favour. He raises the foreign policy concern issues – exactly of the sort the Foreign Minister would later make in public. And while Breman is technically correct to say that “he supported her decision” it really reads a lot more like “what is done is done. too late now, but….you are my new handpicked Governor and of course I will back you”.

That he was hardly an enthusiastic supporter is also implied by a email to the Board the Governor sends out the following day, which includes this “I have discussed this with our Chair at length yesterday”. The “at length” really says it all. Finlay seems to deserve a rare “well done”.

And what of the rest of government. The official statement now says:

But in fact, even here the documents released suggest a less favourable story. Two of the Assistant Governors weigh in enthusiastically when they finally read the email (after 8am – don’t these senior people check their emails when they wake up?), only for one – a non policy guy – to suggest that perhaps “we should also give MoF a heads-up…..maybe MFAT” – maybe, when the boss has, hours ago, signed up to a statement by implication attacking the volatile US President. Karen Silk, the egregiously underqualified macro policy DCE then qualifies her enthusiasm with a belated “sorry, also agree with John – in particular MFAT just as an FYI”. She – the macro person – apparently didn’t think Treasury or the Minister were worth bothering about.

The Governor herself may still have been on her way to work at this point – she isn’t part of the email chain – but some comms people get on to telling the Minister of Finance’s office, but even then there is no record of them advising Treasury or MFAT. Quite when Breman spoke to Willis or Rennie isn’t clear although it seems to have been later in the morning (there is no email traffic relevant to these calls, either mooting them or reporting what was discussed).

The final set of documents released relate to an email to Board members from the Governor the following day.

She claims “we were encouraged to sign asap” but…..after all, she was a free agent. The statement itself had already gone out. It is simply extraordinary that the Governor – a new Governor, with probably (and understandably) little sense of New Zealand government ways or foreign policy perspectives – allowed herself to be rushed into signing up with the cool kids without consulting a single other person on her side, in the middle of the night. What, precisely, would have been the consequences of having said “it is the middle of the night here, I’ll talk to my colleagues in the Bank and elsewhere in government and get back to you by midday”? (In fact the statement on the ECB website still reads “Other central banks may be added to the list of signatories later on” although none have been added since later that first day.)

She concludes this email to board members this way

It betrays an almost incredible degree of naivete. The Bank – like many government entities – has some, quite defined, operational independence. It is however fully a part of the New Zealand public sector. The Minister of Finance appoints and dismisses the Governor, sets spending limits, sets policy targets etc. How did the Governor not think that her signing on might be seen by some as stepping across foreign policy boundaries? Being the middle of the night is no excuse – all manner of real crises can occur in the dark hours too. It was a serious rookie error.

Responses from only two board members are recorded, both formal and neither offering either support (or criticism)

And the Bank’s summary statement ends this way

Previous reports indicate that she had also apologised to the Minister of Finance.

As I said earlier, I’m not here to debate the pros and cons of the statement. My interest is in two things. The first is the apparent inexperience and rookie-error stuff of the new Governor, revealed in her actions and descriptions. Relatedly is how weak her management team seem – it took hours for any one of her top team to suggest that perhaps they needed to look others in government know, none of them raised the foreign policy/appearance issues, and none of them seem to have proposed a strategy to deal with the mess they found when they woke up (Silk, here, seems particularly culpable).

And then there is the spin still to this day. Why skip over the fact that you hadn’t been invited to sign up initially, or that the statement had gone out (and been reported on) well before the 1am meeting even started. Why suggest, in the summary statement, that the board chair had been more enthusiastic than the later documents really suggest. Why imply an urgency – to act without consulting anyone, having gone into a meeting apparently not even aware of the statement – that simply was not, in any substantive way there.

It is a pretty poor start from the Governor, not at all consistent with her statements about improving transparency. Perhaps it is an illustration of the old line that you can change the people but organisational cultures – good and (in this case) ill – can prove quite enduring.

She needs to up her game, and the board and Minister need to insist on it.

UPDATE (Fri): The OIA response came this morning (in substance the same as what the RB put out yesterday)

RB OIA response to Powell statement involvement in Jan 2026

About 15 years ago (partly thanks to a couple of years at Treasury, partly to the financial crises in the US and Europe) I started to get much more systematically interested in New Zealand’s disappointing and underwhelming economic performance, and in economic and financial history more generally. And as our kids were growing I was thinking about what to do next. The idea of writing a blog (it was still the heyday of economics blogging) appealed, focused on New Zealand economic (under)performance issues – something I obviously couldn’t do as a public servant. The kids were going to grow up fast and I wanted to be around more for them. My wife got to a position in her career where we could live fairly comfortably on one income and fortunately that coincided with Graeme Wheeler’s desire to be rid of me. And thus, with that double coincidence of wants, this blog launched on 2 April 2015.

Those who’ve followed the blog from early days may recall that for several years I was often writing twice a day, often six days a week. I had fairly voracious interests and the blog found a surprising (to me) number of readers. It also became more Reserve Bank focused than I’d ever envisaged (productivity etc matters a great deal more).

From time to time I’ve thought about how long to continue and in what form. Frequency of posts dropped off, through some combination of circumstances, including poor health for much of the last five years (weird fatigue, including post-Covid, that came and went to some extent but never seemed to go away) and other commitments. I was fortunate enough to be appointed to the board of the (central) Bank of Papua New Guinea two years ago, which has proved to be a big time commitment, and introduced something of a six-weekly cycle to posting here.

On the 10th anniversary of the blog earlier this year, I noted

Circumstances change and I’ve got busier. I have occasionally thought about shutting it down and doing other stuff – I had an outline on my desk when the BPNG appointment came through of a time-consuming project I’d still like to pursue. For now, various circumstances and considerations mean I’m going to try to discipline my public comment more narrowly. There has been an increasing range of things I’d like to have written about but it wasn’t possible/appropriate. For this blog that will mean primarily Reserve Bank things, fiscal policy, productivity and not much else, which was the original intended focus.

And now the time has come to discontinue the blog, at least as a forum for regular economic and economic policy commentary/analysis. I certainly haven’t lost interest in the issues, and the economic and institutional problems, here and elsewhere, haven’t gone away. But there have been a couple of influences. As I noted in April there has been an increasing range of things I couldn’t really comment on. Some of that was about the senior role my wife has held this year (eg largely avoiding things – many – her minister was responsible for). But longer-term my BPNG role, where I now chair the board’s financial stability and related issues committee, has also come to act as a constraint: I don’t find it as easy to comment much on things like bank capital, CBDCs, exchange rate regimes, financial market regulation, payment systems, emergency liquidity provision, failure management (or the IMF). I’ve also become increasingly uneasy about writing on central bank governance and related issues, even when specific issues are very different by country. I’d have stopped months ago if it hadn’t been for the whistleblower whose disclosures to me helped us get closer to the bottom of the Orr/Quigley stories.

So those were some constraints. But at least as importantly is the question of opportunity cost. I could have kept on writing this blog in some form or another more or less indefinitely. But time isn’t unlimited, and having given this ten years plus, I might have ten good years ahead. There are other things to do and focus on. As just one example, thinking more seriously about New Zealand’s economic and financial history, including in a cross-country context.

And, mercifully, in recent months my health seems finally to have fully recovered. I’m back to walking, fairly fast, an hour a day and getting home not exhausted. It is a very nice change to have that energy back.

I’m not going into some sort of economics purdah, but I won’t be writing regular commentary etc here at all. I will leave the website in place, and may occasionally add a post on some interesting economics book I’ve read or an aspect of economic history that takes my fancy. Perhaps also I’ll weaken very occasionally if some current issue really gets my goat, but this post is about tying myself to the mast. My intent is to stop, and to stay stopped.

And if I’m writing shorter pieces much of it may be more oriented towards my fellow Christians. I do have another blog, and I have started writing there again in the last couple of months. I intend to keep on with that, and to read more deeply in theology, biblical studies, and related societal issues.

Anyway, thank you to the everyone who has read the blog over the last 10+ years. It has, mostly, been fun, and stimulating. Writing has often clarified my own thinking and it has been great to have had an audience. I’ve enjoyed interacting with a range of people through blog comments and private correspondence. And I’m not going anywhere.

It is the church’s season of Advent. In the first few years of the blog I’d often include some explicitly Christian material to end my final post each year. So here I’ll leave you with the words of one of my favourite Advent carols.