Dr Eric Crampton: You could have it so much better - The quiet victories of the NZ economy

Every July, members of the New Zealand Association of Economists – academics, practitioners, and officials – meet to tell each other what they’ve been working on. Work presented tends to be work-in-progress. We get a chance to see the work while it is still being built and discuss ways of improving it.

This kind of conference never tends to have an organising theme. Sessions run in parallel; people attend the ones that strike their fancy. If I had to draw a theme from the set I attended, I’d start with one of the last talks I saw.