The economies of the former Soviet Bloc experienced large declines in output during the decade of transition which began with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Yet there are many reasons to believe that measured output and official deflators provide a poor proxy for the change in real...

After two decades of tax neutrality for private saving, New Zealand policy changed radically with the recent introduction of tax incentives for KiwiSaver. A key issue for tax-favoured saving schemes is the extent to which existing saving is reshuffled versus new saving created by reduced...

New Zealand’s approach to retirement incomes profoundly changed with the recent introduction of KiwiSaver and its associated tax incentives. Previous policy reduced lifetime inequality but KiwiSaver and its tax incentives will increase future inequality and lead to diverging living standards...

Immigrants are typically found to have less wealth and hold it in different forms than the native born. These differences may affect both the economic assimilation of immigrants and overall portfolio allocation when immigrants are a large share of the population, as in New Zealand. In this...

The goal of the World Bank is 'a world free of poverty' but the most widely used poverty measures do not show when poverty might be eliminated. The 'head-count index' simply counts the poor, while the 'poverty gap index' shows their average shortfall from the poverty line. Neither measure...

In urban China the Household Income and Expenditure Survey requires respondents to keep a daily expenditure diary for a full 12-month period. This onerous reporting task makes it difficult to recruit households into the survey, compromising the representative nature of the sample. In this...

In this note, propensity score matching (PSM) methods are applied to data from the 2005 International Social Survey Program Work Orientations (ISSP-WO) survey to examine the public sector pay premium in New Zealand. Taking account of a wide range of worker characteristics and attitudes, job...

Many are interested in China’s energy situation, however, numerous energy related issues in China still remain unanswered, for example, what are the potential forces driving energy demand and supply? Previous reviews focused only on fossil fuel based energy and ignored other important elements...

The nature and location of urbanization economies and their effects on productivity per worker in China are examined. Unlike previous studies, more accurate resident-based measures of urban scale from the 2010 census are used. The size of urbanization economies is similar to those in other...

The large literature on regional inequality in China is hampered by incomplete evidence on price dispersion across space, making it hard to distinguish real and nominal inequality. The two main methods used to calculate spatial deflators have been to price a national basket of goods and services...