For a few months after last year’s elections, Wellington consultancies seemed to be scrambling to publish reports on city deals. National’s coalition agreement with ACT promised long-term city deals for funding and financing infrastructure but was short on details. Read more

Both the prior Labour government and the current National-led coalition have wanted to deliver more affordable housing. But getting there is like trying to traverse an overgrown forest path. Read more

There’s a weird art to commissioned cost-benefit assessments. Even when it seems like a report’s funder really wanted a particular result and even if the final number seems absurd, the report can still be valuable. Read more

Adam Smith warned that meetings of people of the same trade quickly turn into conspiracies against the public or contrivances to raise prices. He neglected to mention the benefits of meetings of people from vastly different trades. Read more

The way the government tries to protect us against earthquake risks, and to protect heritage buildings against change, share a common problem. Government agencies have a very difficult time generating the information necessary for making good decisions in both cases. Read more

American supply-side conservatives got one big thing right two decades ago, but they got a bigger thing wrong. And it’s relevant to current debates about our Coalition Government’s proposed tax cuts. Read more

The Sen̓áḵw development near downtown Vancouver, British Columbia, won’t quite be a city within the city. But it will be close. Read more