Miscellaneous papers

• Contribution to the food miles debate in New Zealand. This category contains a paper written for the National Business Review for March 2, 2007, and a letter to and reply from the Minister of Agriculture on the same subject. The position taken is that protectionist interests in New Zealand's trading partners could take over the food miles debate and ask their governments to introduce carbon levies on imports of food and thus discriminate against New Zealand trade.
• 'Reforming EU Farm Policy: Lessons from New Zealand' (2001) PDF Occasional Paper 112, Institute of Economic Affairs, London This 32-page essay was designed to make the case for further deregulation of the Common Agricultural Policy in a more international market direction. It demonstrates how a small agriculturally exporting economy like New Zealand can retreat from a fairly highly regulated environment to a more open economy in the space of 10 years. There were some pains of adjustment and Government help was required at crucial times. The implications for trade reform are discussed in a final chapter. In a book of the same title, published by the IEA, my essay is followed by a commmentary by Richard Howarth, an IEA commentator. The link is in pdf format.

• 'The Contribution of Agriculture to the National Economy of New Zealand' 1999 meeting of Australian Agricultural and Resource Economic Society, Christchurch, NZ. This is polemical piece, eight pages in length, deploring the lack of understanding of politicians and administrators of the sources of productive efficiency in the NZ economy. It was later reprinted in Agricultural Science, New Series, Vol 12 (4), 1999, Carlton, Victoria.

• Comment on E.K.Bensah's review of Trade Performance and Commodity Dependence (UNCTAD) EK Bensah reviewed this UNCTAD report on the wto_forum@yahoogroups.com website in February 2004. This paper is an abbreviated version of a review of the same report I prepared in June 2004. The full version will be published in early 2005. I discuss the implication of commodity trade reform on African nations south of the Sahara with emphasis on smallholder agriculture. Posted on the wto_forum website 20 Sept 2004.

• A Review of Healthy Money Healthy Planet: Developing sustainability through new money systems, by Deirdre Kent, which appears in 'New Zealand Books', a Wellington publication.

• Market Signals Gone Awry, The Independent 5 April 2006, p8. This is a letter to the Editor in response to an article Infrastructure Stuck in the Slow Lane published on 8 March 2006. That article made the point that the country's roading expenditure was half the proportion of GDP compared with the 1960s and 1970s. My letter updates some earlier results of mine that were published on 29 September 1999. In the period 1995-2002 capital stocks employed by the energy sector rose by 5%, those of the transport sector rose by 1% and those of the communications sector rose by 57%. I question whether the national planning arrangements for transport and energy are adequate in the face of the obvious lack of investment in these two sectors.