NZCPR Weekly: The Real New Zealand

Dear NZCPR Reader,   

This week we examine three international assessments of New Zealand and make some policy recommendations, our NZCPR Guest Commentator, Singapore-based Dr David Skilling, shares his perspective of New Zealand’s performance, and this week’s poll asks whether you think welfare beneficiaries should be drug tested.

*To read the newsletter click HERE.
*To register for the NZCPR Weekly mailing list, click HERE.  

Daniel Michell: Higher Taxes and Bigger Government Is Not a Recipe for Growth

I must be perversely masochistic because I have the strange habit of reading reports issued by international bureaucracies such as the International Monetary Fund, World Bank,United Nations, and Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

But one tiny silver lining to this dark cloud is that it’s given me an opportunity to notice how these groups have settled on a common strategy of urging higher taxes for the ostensible purpose of promoting growth and development.

Richard Rahn from the Cato Institute: Tracing Pathways to Success and Failure

Why is Hong Kong rich, Cuba very poor, and Puerto Rico struggling? Back in 1955, the islands of Puerto Rico, Cuba and Hong Kong had roughly the same real per capita income. They each took very different economic paths. 

Now, some 60 years later, Hong Kong is even richer than the United States on a per capita income basis. Cuba is an economic disaster, having gone from the richest Caribbean nation to the poorest, next to Haiti. And Puerto Rico finds itself flirting with bankruptcy, with a per capita income much higher than Cuba’s but only roughly half that of Hong Kong. Incomes have increased approximately 22-fold in Hong Kong, 11-fold in Puerto Rico, and only fourfold at best in Cuba, in a little over a half-century.