The Dismal Science

Border Costs

Eric Crampton • Mar 02, 2021

• America's Cup,
• COVID-19,
• immigration,
• MIQ,
• pcr testing

Cecile Meier walks us through some of the costs of a border system that has neither been able to safely scale up to meet need, nor able to find any reasonable way of prioritising entry into those scarce MIQ spaces. When Zane Gillbee hugged his family goodbye in South Africa before moving to Wellington, his daughter Lyla was still … Read More

Blessed are they that have not seen the model, and yet have believed

Eric Crampton • Mar 02, 2021

• climate change,
• Climate Commission,
• emissions trading scheme,
• government policy,
• New Zealand economy

The Climate Change Commission’s recommendations span the breadth of the economy. They are required to come up with sector-by-sector climate budgets consistent with getting New Zealand with net zero emissions under the Zero Carbon Act. The sector-by-sector budgets rest on underlying models. The models build predictions about what will happen as ETS prices rise, and what will happen when some … Read More

For a bigger carbon dividend

Eric Crampton • Mar 01, 2021

• carbon price,
• climate change,
• Climate Commission,
• emissions trading scheme

New Zealand has an excellent Emissions Trading Scheme covering everything except agriculture – a non-trivial exclusion, but we can come back to that later. The ETS has a cap. Net emissions from the covered sector cannot exceed the cap. So any other regulations that affect sectors covered by the cap only shift things around within the cap and affect the … Read More

Test, test, test

Eric Crampton • Feb 18, 2021

• COVID-19,
• managed isolation and quarantine facilities,
• MIQ,
• pcr testing,
• saliva testing

My column over at Newsroom this week points out the fairly obvious. The government can add daily saliva testing for everyone at the border to the existing testing regimen. If daily testing winds up proving the swab tests to be redundant, ditch the swab tests when we find that out. If it turns out they’re both useful, keep both. Read More

Forests and intertemporal equilibrium

Eric Crampton • Feb 17, 2021

• carbon pricing,
• Economics,
• emissions trading scheme,
• forestry,
• intergenerational equity

I’m a bit of an ETS-absolutist. Or at least a carbon-pricing absolutist, in a place the size of NZ. I think the Weitzman reasons for preferring a carbon tax to an ETS are second-order relative to political economy considerations, and any weight at all put on switching costs makes it ludicrous to want NZ to flip from an ETS to … Read More

JEEM

Eric Crampton • Jan 19, 2021

• Academic journals,
• Environmental Economics,
• environmental management,
• new research

Getting to Browser Tab Zero so I can reboot the computer is awfully hard when the one open tab is a Table of Contents for the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, and every issue has more stuff I want to read. A few highlights: Gugler et al demonstrating the effectiveness of British carbon pricing over German regulatory interventions … Read More

Vaccines are cheap

Eric Crampton • Jan 19, 2021

• border control,
• COVID-19,
• lockdown,
• MIQ,
• vaccines

Israel chose to pay a bit over the odds for the Pfizer vaccine to get earlier access. Here’s The Times of Israel from 16 November. American government will be charged $39 for each two-shot dose, and the European bloc even less, but Jerusalem said to agree to pay $56. Israel has now vaccinated more than 80% of their elderly … Read More

Aristocracy of Pull continues

Eric Crampton • Jan 18, 2021

• COVID-19,
• managed isolation and quarantine facilities,
• MIQ,
• quarantine

RNZ reports on continued arbitrariness on decisions at the border.  British comedian Russell Howard is about to tour New Zealand and other acts allowed in through managed isolation this summer include drag queen RuPaul and musicians at Northern Bass in Mangawhai and the Bay Dreams festival. The vice-president of the Promoters Association, Gray Bartlett, said despite being an approved … Read More

Cleansing the Twitters

Eric Crampton • Jan 13, 2021

• Social media,
• trump,
• Twitter

I’m less than convinced by arguments that platforms like Twitter should be subject to common carrier regulation preventing them from being able to decide who to keep on as clients of their free services, and who they would not like to serve. It’s much easier to create competition for the network in this case than it was for Telecom in … Read More

For a carbon dividend

Eric Crampton • Dec 16, 2020

• carbon emissions,
• carbon tax,
• Climate Commission,
• emissions trading scheme

My Dom Post column this week makes the case for a carbon dividend. Canada imposes a carbon tax on provinces that haven’t established their own carbon pricing regime, and is set to substantially hike the tax to $170/tonne.  How is it politically feasible? Money collected in each province is sent back as a grant to residents in each province. Carbon … Read More