Eric Crampton • Jul 14, 2015 •
The Dom Post wants to tax plastic bags. In doing so, they advance what has to be among the sillier counter-arguments to a study.The Dom writes:Just why does a small levy, of perhaps five or 10 cents a bag, typically have such a big effect on behaviour?... Read More
Eric Crampton • May 06, 2015 •
No, the external costs of dairying in New Zealand are nowhere near either dairy's export earnings or dairy's contribution to GST GDP [my typo, sorry].A peer-reviewed study authored by Massey University scientists has claimed that worst-case scenar... Read More
Eric Crampton • Dec 23, 2014 •
James Zuccollo writes on the UK's Office for Budget Responsibility:In contrast to his fiscal rules, Osborne has had enormous success with his greatest fiscal innovation: the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR). It was created in 2010 and has been successful in curbing the problems of over-optimistic forecasts that plagued the Treasury through the 2000s. Its ruthless transparency has lent … Read More
Eric Crampton • Aug 29, 2014 •
Christchurch Council and the government will buy out some Christchurch properties at high risk of landslide. Here's Chris Hutching at NBR:The government and Christchurch City Council will buy 16 Port Hills properties."The latest council-commissioned GNS Science reports show 37 green-zoned homes are in areas where the risk to life from mass movement (sometimes called landslide) is considered intolerable,” according to … Read More
Eric Crampton • Jul 25, 2014 •
Kiwiblog reports on an Otago study looking at uptake of coronial recommendations. It's gated at the NZMJ, but Stuff and the Herald have coverage.Jennifer Moore went through all the coronial recommendations from mid-2007 through mid-2012: 1644 of t... Read More
Eric Crampton • Jun 07, 2014 •
The Ministry of Justice report on minimum pricing and excise got one big important thing right: it counted as a cost that consumers would lose consumer surplus. It balanced that against potential health savings for some and potential reductions in alcohol-related crime. While I disagreed with their underlying elasticity estimates, which led them to understate consumption losses relative to … Read More
Eric Crampton • Jun 03, 2014 •
Pierre Lemieux points to the growing health regulatory state. The abstract:Public health has moved from the public good component of health to everything related to health and, then, to everything related to society. If we take public health in its wide, total, social sense, it presumably explains or justifies much of the regulatory state. Virtually all state activities contribute … Read More
Eric Crampton • Mar 21, 2014 •
The Greens' Julie Anne Genter provides some helpful comments on the cost-benefit assessment cited in their cycling proposal.This is going to be an incomplete answer and I can't promise to get fully immersed in a lengthy debate. Short answer: we used th... Read More
Eric Crampton • Mar 14, 2014 •
The Greens recommend shifting some transport funding from lower value roading projects towards bike lanes near schools. It doesn't seem like a bad idea, so long as NZTA does proper modelling of effects on traffic flows and doesn't wind up putting too great of constraints on trunk routes that happen to go by schools.But I wish they wouldn't have … Read More
Eric Crampton • Dec 11, 2013 •
Gordon Tullock had two standard lines for the (many) anarchists in our grad programme. One was that government was needed to mandate interconnection between private roads. The other was that we need government to enforce quarantines during pandemics.An... Read More