Rescuing the New Zealand Economy

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Many New Zealanders are confused and disturbed by the current economic malaise of cripplingly high interest rates and an over-valued New Zealand dollar. Since the radical reforms of the mid-1980s, we have been consistently told that this is the inevitable result of good economic management. Bryan Gould, however, disagrees. In Rescuing the New Zealand Economy he argues that the ruling monetarist orthodoxy is seriously flawed and has been responsible for decades of damage to our productive economy.

This book looks beyond the recent, depressing past to a more optimistic vision for the future. Drawing on the experience of other Western democracies that have been far more economically successful than New Zealand, he outlines mainstream, well-tested ways for restoring productivity and controlling inflation without stifling economic growth.

Readable and clear, Rescuing the New Zealand Economy is ultimately a plea for people to become better informed and enter into the debate about how we can revive the New Zealand economy. Change will come only if people demand it, and reading this book is an important first step in making that happen.

Bryan Gould was born and educated in New Zealand. He won a Rhodes Scholarship in 1962 which took him to Oxford and on to a career as a diplomat in the British Foreign Office and as a law don at Oxford. He was elected to the House of Commons as a Labour Member of Parliament in 1974. After serving in both Neil Kinnock’s and John Smith’s Labour Shadow Cabinets, and contesting the Labour leadership in 1992, he left British politics in 1994 to become the Vice-Chancellor of Waikato University, a post he held until his retirement in 2004. He now lives in the Bay of Plenty.