David C. Maré

Movements Into and Out of Child Poverty in New Zealand: Results from the Linked Income Supplement

This paper considers the dynamics of child income poverty in New Zealand. Annual movements into and out of poverty by children’s households in New Zealand over the 1997/98, 1998/99, and 1999/2000 periods are analysed. The annual Income Supplement to the Household Labour Force Survey allows tracking of dwellings and people in two consecutive June quarterly weeks, and thus allows observation of changes in equivalised household disposable income over a June year. This project is the first to use the Linked Income Survey for analysis of income dynamics and is part of the Ministry of Social Policy’s ongoing research on family dynamics.New Zealand adult and child poverty transitions are compared. Child poverty transitions in New Zealand are compared and contrasted to those of five other countries—Britain, Germany, Hungary, Russia and Spain—where a similar current income measure of poverty is available. The frequency of poverty “trigger events” in New Zealand and their impact on the chances of children exiting and entering poverty are compared to similar data for Britain and West Germany.

Indirect Effects of Active Labour Market Policies

This paper provides an overview of the analysis of the indirect effects of active labour market policies. Indirect effects arise where some of the improved labour market outcomes for programme participants come at the expense of other workers or jobseekers. The paper outlines some common theories about how indirect effects operate, and discusses approaches to estimating the strength of indirect effects. It also presents a brief summary of relevant empirical findings. The paper is intended as a relatively non-technical guide for policy analysts working on the design, costing, and evaluation of active labour market policies.

What do Endogenous Growth Models Contribute

Endogenous growth theory is one of the mainstream economics approaches to modelling economic growth. This paper provides a non-technical overview of some key strands of the endogenous growth theory (EGT) literature, providing references to key articles and texts. The intended audience is policy analysts who want to understand the intuition behind EGT models. The paper should be accessible to someone without much economics training.

Moving to Jobs

This paper examines whether New Zealand residents move from low-growth to high-growth regions, using New Zealand census data from the past three inter-censal periods (covering 1986-2001). We focus on the relationship between employment growth and migration flows to gauge the strength of the relationship and the stability of the relationship over the business cycle. We find that people move to areas of high employment growth, but that the probability of leaving a region is less strongly related to that regions fortunes. We also find that migration flows to the metropolitan regions of Auckland, Canterbury and Wellington include a higher proportion of international immigrants compared with the rest of New Zealand.

Ideas for Growth

There is much talk of the knowledge economy, and the central role of ideas and knowledge in generating economic growth. This paper provides a brief review of the economic literature on how skills/ knowledge/ ideas might contribute to higher output or higher rates of growth. Ideas are complementary inputs into production, in the sense that they raise the productivity of other inputs. Some of the complementarities may give rise to externalities-effects that do not have to be paid for. For investments in ideas to generate output growth, these complementarities must be particularly strong. I conclude with some comments on what policy makers can draw from the literature, which is some encouragement but little specific guidance.

Changes in the Māori Income Distribution: Evidence from the Population Census

This paper uses census data to identify the main changes in the individual-level income distribution of working-aged Mâori between 1991 and 2001, and to analyse the effects of changes in the distribution of socio-demographic attributes and labour market activity patterns on the Mâori income distribution. There was substantial real income growth at most points in the income distribution, and particularly at points above the 30th percentile, but a decline in real incomes at the very lowest percentiles. The socio-demographic and labour market changes considered help to explain much of the income growth that was recorded at lower- middle to upper levels of income. However, they fail to account for the increase in the proportion of people with negative, nil, or very low incomes.

Maori Incomes: Investigating Differences Between Iwi

This paper investigates several factors that may be important for improving Maori outcomes, and the extent to which their importance varies by iwi. Specifically, it examines the extent to which controlling for differences in characteristics of the European population and the populations of various iwi can account for the differences in income distribution between the groups. It finds that qualification levels are important-they account for an average of approximately 29% of the difference between iwi and European incomes. The differing age distributions and the proportions of the population with different work and labour force statuses also account for much of the difference. Residence in different types of urban or rural area appears less relevant, as does residence in different regional council areas. The sizes of the influences of the different factors vary considerably by iwi and sometimes by gender. This suggests that policies aimed at improving Maori incomes may be more cost-effective if they target specific iwi.

Housing Markets and Migration: Evidence from New Zealand

New Zealands large and volatile external migration flows generate significant year-to-year fluctuations in the demand for residential housing. This paper uses population data from the 1986, 1991, 1996, 2001 and 2006 New Zealand Censuses, house sales price data from Quotable Value New Zealand and rent data from the Department of Building and Housing to examine how population change, international migration, including the return migration of New Zealanders abroad, and internal migration affect rents and sales prices of both apartments and houses in different housing markets in New Zealand. Our analysis focuses on the relationship between the changes in the population in local areas and changes in house sale prices and rents in these areas. Focusing on changes allows us to control for time-invariant unobservable characteristics of local areas that either attract or repel individuals and lead to differential costs of housing.

Defining Geographic Communities

The purpose of this paper is to provide a guide to concepts, ideas, and measurements of geographic communities. The paper investigates the various concepts of geographic communities found in the literature and reviews existing studies to determine how researchers measure geographic communities in practice.

Settlement Patterns and the Geographic Mobility of Recent Migrants to New Zealand

Twenty-three percent of New Zealands population is foreign-born and forty percent of migrants have arrived in the past ten years. Newly arriving migrants tend to settle in spatially concentrated areas and this is especially true in New Zealand. This paper uses census data to examine the characteristics of local areas that attract new migrants and gauges the extent to which migrants are choosing to settle where there are the best labour market opportunities as opposed to where there are already established migrant networks. We estimate McFaddens choice models to examine both the initial location choice made by new migrants and the internal mobility of this cohort of migrants five years later. This allows us to examine whether the factors that affect settlement decision change as migrants spend more time in New Zealand.