The Dismal Science

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

RSE, MIQ, and WTF

Eric Crampton • Dec 16, 2020

• COVID-19,
• managed isolation and quarantine facilities,
• Pacific Island workers,
• Recognised Seasonal Employment (RSE)

Late last month, the government announced it would allow 2000 seasonal workers into New Zealand’s Managed Isolation and Quarantine system on Recognised Seasonal Employment (RSE) scheme, with workers to arrive from January to March 2021.  There’s just so much that’s backward in all of this. The RSE scheme is open to workers from the Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji, … Read More

Rationing scarce MIQ spaces

Eric Crampton • Nov 13, 2020

• COVID-19,
• horticulture,
• managed isolation and quarantine facilities,
• seasonal workers

Imagine yourself in the place of the MBIE boffin tasked with deciding which application for a scarce MIQ space is most deserving or most needed. The job isn’t easy. The government keeps a small number of spaces in MIQ for getting critical workers in. But somebody has to decide which workers are most critical. Applicants fill in forms to make … Read More