Economic Reform and Macroeconomic Policy in New Zealand

In 1984 the Labour government in New Zealand began a wide-ranging process of reform with the objective of achieving a sustainable improvement in economic performance. The breadth and rapidity with which deregulation, tax reform, and privatisation were implemented has attracted widespread interest. The expected improvement in macroeconomic performance, however, has not yet been realised.This article describes some background to the policy shift, and focuses on macroeconomic aspects of the reforms. It argues that while many improvements in microeconomic resource allocation have been made, the interaction between monetary, fiscal and wages policies has contributed substantially to the present high cost of structural change in New Zealand. Copyright 1990 The University of Melbourne, Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research.

Building generalizable case-based theory in human resources management

Copyright © 2018 by Emerald Publishing Limited. This study applies asymmetric rather than conventional symmetric analysis to advance theory in occupational psychology. The study applies systematic case-based analyses to model complex relations among conditions (i.e., configurations of high and low scores for variables) in terms of set memberships of managers. The study uses Boolean algebra to identify configurations (i.e. recipes) reflecting complex conditions sufficient for the occurrence of outcomes of interest (e.g., high versus low financial job stress, job strain, and job satisfaction). The study applies complexity theory tenets to offer a nuanced perspective concerning the occurrence of contrarian cases-for example, in identifying different cases (e.g., managers) with high membership scores in a variable (e.g., core self-evaluation) who have low job satisfaction scores and when different cases with low membership scores in the same variable have high job satisfaction. In a large-scale empirical study of managers (n 1/4 928) in four (contextual) segments of the farm industry in New Zealand, this study tests the fit and predictive validities of set membership configurations for simple and complex antecedent conditions that indicate high/low core self-evaluations, job stress, and high/low job satisfaction. The findings support the conclusion that complexity theory in combination with configural analysis offers useful insights for explaining nuances in the causes and outcomes to high stress as well as low stress among farm managers. Some findings support and some are contrary to symmetric relationship findings (i.e., highly significant correlations that support main effect hypotheses)

After the quake: the complex dance of local government, national government and accounting

This research considers accounting for post-earthquake recovery in New Zealand. New Zealand’s most devastating earthquakes are considered to be the Murchison earthquake of 1929, the Napier/Hawke’s Bay earthquake of 1931 and the Christchurch earthquakes of 2010–11. At the time of the Murchison and Napier earthquakes, government accounting information was an ex post record of expenditure. Contemporary government accounting in New Zealand is accrual based and comprehensive, and so accounting information has played a more prominent role in the management of Christchurch’s earthquake recovery. Apart from evidencing the significant change to government accounting, an historical comparison of accounting in the context of the Murchison and Napier earthquakes vis-à-vis the Christchurch earthquakes indicates the extent of change in the interplay between national and local government in New Zealand. The relationship between national and local government, though legally unchanged, has become more complex, but the financial reports do not reveal this complexity. Through historical analysis the extent of this change is made visible