I’ve spent the last week writing a fairly substantial review of a recent book (“Australia’s Pandemic Exceptionalism: How we crushed the curve but lost the race”) by a couple of Australian academic economists on Australia’s pandemic policies and experiences. For all its limitations, there isn’t anything similar in New Zealand.

What we do have is the Phase 1 report of the Covid Royal Commission which was released by the government at the end of November. You can find the full 700+ page report here. I haven’t read the full report but did read Chapter 6 on “Economic and social impacts and responses” (which starts on page 242 of the Report itself, or page 285 of the pdf). It was, frankly, a pretty disappointing read. If the overall Royal Commission report itself got surprisingly little coverage, I don’t think I’ve seen any mention at all (certainly no serious or sustained reporting or analysis) on the economic dimensions of that exceptional period.

It is disappointing on a number of counts. First, and perhaps least important to me at this point, we were told (and the terms of reference make clear) that the focus on the Royal Commission was supposed to be on lessons learned with a view to being better equipped/prepared to handle future pandemics. But in the economics section of chapter 6 there is almost none of that, and the focus seems to be almost entirely on describing and evaluating policy responses and the impact of them. Which would be fine, except that the chapter is very much an establishment perspective, with little or no sign of any critical scrutiny before reaching the generally rather complacent conclusions.

I went and had a look at the list of engagements and people the Royal Commission had met with had over the course of their inquiry. I was looking to see which economists, academic or otherwise, the Royal Commission might have met with. They had, of course, met with The Treasury and the Reserve Bank, they’d met with three [named] former Secretaries to the Treasury (another former Secretary to the Treasury was one of the commissioners), they note a meeting with one economist described as a “public policy expert” on aspects of the wage subsidy scheme. And other than that all we got was, in November 2023, a mention that they had met with “various [unnamed] independent economic commentators”. Which was more than a little surprising when, for example, leading New Zealand economist John Gibson had been producing work on related issues since early days of the pandemic (discussed first on this blog here), as had former academic Martin Lally. I worked my way through the 12 pages of end notes to Chapter 6, and not only was there no reference to anything by Gibson or Lally, but there was no reference to any commentary or critique etc by any outside economists, academic or otherwise (although there is a quote from a Bernard Hickey Substack). There is a one sentence reference to “considerable concern” they heard from “some expert stakeholders” about the LSAP, only to dismiss this on the grounds that “these policies are now well accepted by international organisations” and going on to channel the Reserve Bank’s own lines in its defence. Fiscal losses of “in the order of $11 billion” are noted. but there is no attempt to evaluate the strategy or to think about how support might better (and more cheaply) be provided in future. That isn’t scrutiny and evaluation; it is reporting.

The chapter is weak right from the start, when the Commissioners simply assert (there is no supporting analysis) that “the strict public health measures introduced in March 2020, especially the border closure and national lockdowns, were essential [emphasis added] to protect the economy and society from the immediate and devastating effects of the pandemic had the virus been allowed to spread unchecked”. There is no analysis as to what extent of restrictions was required (it is a very all or nothing assertion), there is no reference to the fact that significant reductions in movement were occurring prior to any legal restrictions (or, for example, to the work of Goolsbee and Syverson from the US, using mobile phone data, and suggesting that almost 90 per cent of reductions in movement pre-dated legal restrictions). There is no suggestion of any cost-benefit approach at the margins (as there was no sign of it in the official advice, and we recall the trouble the Productivity Commission got into when they did one brief illustrative exercise), and no comparison looking at how the economic costs and benefits of the New Zealand approach stacked up. Of course, no country let the virus “spread unchecked” but the US is often used as a foil and counterpoint to New Zealand and Australia, and for all the differences in approach it is striking how similar the respective paths of real GDP per capita proved to be (for quite different health outcomes of course).

I don’t have a strong view on what, if anything, in this area should have been done differently, but we should have expected more challenge and scrutiny from the Royal Commissioners.

There is no attempt anywhere in the chapter to consider whether the things fiscal policy was used for could have been done (materially) more cheaply – either in evaluating 2020 and 2021 or thinking about the future. The fiscal costs were staggeringly high. It also isn’t clear that the Royal Commission really understands the point of the initial fiscal approach. They talk about the aim being to support economic activity, when in fact it was quite the contrary: the point of the lockdowns (and private risk-averse behaviour) was to largely shut down the economy for a time. What the wage subsidy approach was designed to do was (a) tide individuals over (the government compelling many not to work, and b) facilitate a quicker rebound than otherwise by maintaining established firm-specific arrangements and human capital. It certainly did the former, but to what extent it really did the latter (see chart above) deserves more serious scrutiny. Headline unemployment rates in the US went far higher than in New Zealand (and Australia) reflecting different intervention approaches, but (see chart) it isn’t immediately obvious that overall US economic performance suffered.

The Royal Commission also runs a line one sees too often, taking the very gloomy economic forecasts that were around in the second quarter of 2020, contrasting them with actual outcomes, and concluding that credit belonged to the policymakers (the Royal Commission hedges a little but is in the same camp with its “No doubt, these better-than-scenario outcomes reflected, at least in part, the speed and generosity of the Government responses”. But that simply has to be wrong. Treasury and Reserve Bank forecasters in the second quarter of 2020 knew all about the scale and nature of all those responses (economic and public health): the effects they expected were already embedded in their forecasts/scenarios. What actually happened was a massive forecasting failure, misunderstanding the nature of the shock and the way the balance of supply and demand pressures was likely to play out. Of course, plenty of private sector commentators and forecasters made the same mistake, but official failures had rather more consequences.

The Royal Commission is keen on the Reserve Bank’s self-described “least regrets” strategy (which, incidentally, has just a single mention in the RB May 2020 MPS), by which they thought – sensibly enough – that faced with a big adverse shock you wanted to act early rather than late. The problem was never with that as applied to RB actions in March 2020, but that they failed to apply anything like the same logic when it started to be apparent that inflation was becoming a problem. They were slow to recognise the speed of the economic rebound or the emerging capacity and core inflation pressures, and were slow to act, and acting rather slowly (Orr to this day attempts distraction, around things like Ukraine that didn’t happen until after the economy was already well-overheated and core inflation had risen strongly). That series of mistakes – in common with many other central banks – added hugely to the overall cost to New Zealanders of the Covid experience, and we are still dealing with the aftermath now. The Royal Commission seemed much more inclined to channel Reserve Bank stories, down to and including repeating a cross-country chart from the Bank’s own self-defence publication designed to make New Zealand look good by using headline inflation in 2022 (much of Europe affected by a gas price shock) rather than core, and the level of unemployment (rather than either the change, the NAIRU gap or the output gap) when – quite unrelated to anything around Covid economic policy – New Zealand has one of the lower NAIRUs in the OECD. Most extraordinarily, and with no supporting analysis at all, the Royal Commissioners conclude that the severe inflation outbreak was an “unavoidable price” of good policies. If so, we’d really better change the Reserve Bank’s mandate, and perhaps whitewash from history their own very weak forecasts for inflation from late 2020 and early-mid 2021. They certainly didn’t think inflation was inevitable; they (paid to get these things roughly right) got their forecasts, and thus policy, badly wrong.

Now to be fair to the Commissioners they do note the obvious, that both fiscal and monetary policy were too loose for too long, but it is all very subdued, and with no insight on what went wrong and why, or what might be better in future. There are complacent comments that if there were some gaps in Reserve Bank/Treasury coordination “it was good by international standards”, even as though offer no evidence for such claims. They don’t even mention – a point the Reserve Bank acknowledged in early 2020 – that the Bank had failed to ensure that negative interest rates were a technical possibility: had it been otherwise they might never have gone so big and so long on the LSAP, at such vast risk and (as it turned out) fiscal costs (the Bank, to be fair to them, had not historically been keen on LSAP types of instruments).

I could go on with many smaller points, but that would mostly be to bore readers. I’ll end with just two: there is no attempt to evaluate whether the exporter freight subsidies really made sense, and for so long, nor is there any attempt to evaluate whether it made sense – as was done at the start of the pandemic response – to permanently increase welfare benefit levels going into a pandemic that was (a) likely to have large economic and fiscal costs, making us poorer on average, and b) wasn’t going to affect the real incomes of those on benefits.

Overall, I thought this bit of the report was a serious lost opportunity. Perhaps the economic establishment (RB, Treasury, Grant Robertson) like it because there is no serious challenge or scrutiny, but just the appearance of it (a 700 page report don’t you know) but what use is that to New Zealanders, either in holding powerful officeholders to account (and yes time were tough but you take these jobs for the tough times) or in being better prepared for the inevitable future adverse shocks.