This book focuses on the challenges facing governments and communities in preparing for and responding to major crises — especially the hard to predict yet unavoidable natural disasters ranging from earthquakes and tsunamis to floods and bushfires, as well as pandemics and global economic crises.

There is reason to hope that long-term fiscal planning can still be effective in New Zealand. Introduction Many countries now require the regular publication of longterm fiscal projections, looking at the potential long-term costs of government spending programmes. In New Zealand, section 26N of the Public Finance Act 1989 (as amended in 2004) requires the...

In this paper presented to the NZ Treasury, Jonathan Boston asks how governments can build good societies—specifically, what kind of public and economic policies should be pursued to reach this goal. Introduction: Public policy is an inherently ethical undertaking. It poses fundamental questions about how we ought to live and how we should order our...

This article examines the causes of child poverty in New Zealand and how child poverty rates might be reduced. New Zealand has tolerated significant levels of relative child poverty for more than two decades. For a country which once prided itself on being comparatively egalitarian and, more particularly, on being a great place to bring...