It is with great pleasure the Association honours Stuart Birks with the award of life membership of the NZ Association of Economists. Stuart arrived at Massey University in 1978, after a stint working in Israeli kibbutzims. He had a BA (Hons) from Essex and an Msc from London. A specialist in mathematical economics and econometrics, having studied under stalwarts like Michio Morishima, Amartya Sen, Frank Hahn, Meghnad Desai and William Gorman, among others, Stuart started increasingly to feel uneasy about the usefulness of the accepted methods and beliefs of economics generally and quantitative economics in particular. He switched to economic policy instead, using the tools of economic theory in a critical manner. Continue reading →

It is with great pleasure the Association honours John Yeabsley with the award of life membership of the NZ Association of Economists. The spring board to John’s career was the excellent academic preparation he received at the University of Canterbury. To an initial BSc in Mathematics he added a BA in Philosophy and Logic. This broad yet rigorous foundation was to serve him well throughout his career. Before leaving Canterbury, John realised that in fact economics was a discipline to which he could apply his mathematics and logic skills, and graduated with an MCom with First Class Honours in Economics.

John then completed a PhD at the University of Essex under the supervision of Sir Anthony Aitkinson. He recalls he was the only student to take New Zealander Rex Bergstrom’s econometrics class. He was also there at the same time as another New Zealander, Peter Phillips.

John has had a long and distinguished career as an economist in the New Zealand public service where he has held senior posts in the Department of Labour (including General Manager of the NZ Immigration Service) and the Department of Trade and Industry, as Assistant Secretary. John represented New Zealand as the Economic Counsellor with the Mission to the UN in Geneva. He is currently a Senior Research Fellow at the NZIER and from 1994 to 1997 was Director of the NZIER. Throughout his professional career, John has been, and still is, an active member of the Association.

John has a formidable reputation as a clear thinker and an uncanny ability to identify important insights on a wide range of problems in the public sector. He has served on or lead reviews of immigration policy, crime prevention, labour markets, tariffs and textiles, amongst others. His broad contributions to the public sector have been recognised through appointments to advisory boards in the Ministries of Justice and Social Development and in Statistics New Zealand.

In making this award we wish to honour John for his service to the profession, the wider New Zealand public, and the Association in particular. To all of these groups John has made numerous high quality contributions over a long period. He has been unfailingly generous in offering advice to colleagues and supporting junior economists.

John has:

1. Provided numerous acts of high quality service to the Association. He has refereed journal articles of New Zealand Economic Papers, and he has served on judging panels for a range of prizes.

2. Organised and facilitated conferences of the Association. Recently he was the co-chair for the highly successful 2008 NZAE/ESAM Conference in honour of AW Phillips in Wellington, the largest gathering of economists ever held in New Zealand. Throughout this endeavour his keen insights, knowledge of the profession and his highly personable approach to team work proved invaluable.

3. Served for an extended period on the Council culminating in his term as President of the Association from 1998 to 2001. During that time he undertook the important task of setting the Association’s administrative and financial procedures on a professional footing.

The Association honours John for the broad contributions he has made on many fronts, and has pleasure in awarding him life membership of the Association

Bert Brownlie was an early supporter and inaugural member of the New Zealand Association of Economists from its foundation in 1959. He served on the editorial board of its journal, New Zealand Economic Papers, from its first issue in 1966 to1980 and was its editor for four years, succeeding Frank Holmes and Ian McDougall in late 1969.

Bert held the view that the journal warranted support from his fellow economists at Canterbury and led by example with two articles, one jointly with a Canterbury colleague, in the first two issues of NZEP. Even before he became editor, Canterbury economists conspicuously contributed at least one-third of the articles in the journal. This ratio rose to nearly one-half during his editorship. And the share of theoretical and applied econometric material published in NZEP also increased markedly from 34% to 75% during his editorial stint. His own published work was largely in applied econometrics on various aspects of the New Zealand economy.

A very significant contribution of Bert Brownlie to the development of the economics profession in New Zealand lay in his efforts to bring a more mathematical-cum-quantitative pedagogic emphasis to the training of economists in line with overseas trends. Soon after he assumed the second chair in economics at Canterbury in 1965 and succeeded Alan Danks as Head of Department, Bert introduced two very important changes in degree regulations at Canterbury to tap the pool of talented students likely to be attracted by the mathematical and statistical applications of economics.

The first change, commonly known at Canterbury as the ” knight’s move “, enabled non-Commerce graduates with a strong mathematical and statistical background to skip introductory and intermediate second-year economics courses and embark on a two-year Masters programme in economics.

The second change was to introduce economics as a “majoring subject” in the Faculty of Science. This opened the possibility for very bright school-leavers to gain ” direct entry ” to the Honours school and complete a B Sc Honours degree in economics in three instead of four years.

The knight’s move programme began in 1967 with an initial intake of three students and was largely responsible for the large Masters economics classes in the period 1968 to the mid-1970s at Canterbury. Many of the students—-from chemistry, engineering, mathematics, physics and statistics and from other New Zealand universities—-were outstanding and went on after graduation to notable careers in academia and the New Zealand public and private sectors.

There is no doubt that the Canterbury Economics Department headed by Bert Brownlie was the largest supplier of economists with quantitative skills in New Zealand in the late 1960s and 1970s.

Bert’s other major contribution as an economist was to serve in a number of national and international committees, including the ECAFE Group of Experts on Programming Techniques (1968-69), NZ Consumer Price Index Revision Committee (1971), Commonwealth Experts Group on a New International Order (1975-77), Wage Hearing Tribunal (1976) and the Commonwealth Experts Group on the World Economic Crises (1980). He was also the Chairman of the New Zealand Monetary and Economic Council (1972-78) as well as the Australia-New Zealand Foundation (1978-83).

Finally, he was appointed Vice-Chancellor of the University of Canterbury in late 1978 to the great delight of many in the institution and his 20-year stewardship as its academic and administrative head was characterised by a lean, efficient and effective administration.

The Association is pleased to award a life membership to Bert for the important part he played in steering NZEP in its early life and his varied and invaluable contributions as mentor, educator, policy advisor and administrator.

It is with great pleasure the Association honours Grant Scobie with the award of life membership of the NZ Association of Economists. Grant, a multi-university attender, graduated in three countries (New Zealand, Australia and the USA) culminating with a PhD from the North Carolina State University. He has been, and still is, an active member of the
Association. His professional life has been varied; with longish spells of academic research and teaching broken up by time as a dedicated researcher and manager. He is currently a Principle Advisor with the Treasury a role that combines his interests in both research and policy.

He has made valuable research contributions over a sustained career, including publications on exchange rates, protection policy, agricultural productivity, and research and development. Recently he has been among the small group of analysts bring reason and empirical findings to bear on that most contentious of New Zealand public debates – retirement policy. In making this award we wish to honour Grant for his service to the profession, the wider New Zealand public, and the Association in particular. To all of these groups Grant has made numerous high quality contributions over a long period.

Grant has:

1. Provided numerous acts of high quality service to the Association. He has refereed journal articles of New Zealand Economic Papers, and he has served on judging panels for a range of prizes including the NZIER Economist of the Year Award.

2. Organised and facilitated conferences of the Association. Notably he was the instigator, co-chair and (informally) lead sponsorship “drummer” for the highly successful 2008 NZAE/ESAM Conference in honour of AW Phillips in Wellington, the largest gathering of economists in New Zealand.

3. Provided service and leadership to the Association by serving as Council Member (2001 to the present), Vice President (2003) and President, (2004 to 2007).

Grant’s infectious enthusiasm and dry wit have provided the platform for him to promote the image and interests of economics widely. Within the profession he is a natural team player whose work is characterised by many instances of joint authorship, and the active encouragement and promotion of more junior colleagues. His own achievements have been marked by the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research Economics Award for 2004. He joins a small but select group who have received this prestigious award. This width of professional engagement means he is a natural model and mentor to many New Zealand economists.

The Association honours Grant for his broad economic citizenship and has pleasure in awarding him life membership of the Association.

March 2009

There were economists in New Zealand before Frank, but not many, and he provides a more or less direct link to the origins of the economics profession in New Zealand. There can be few economists in New Zealand now who have not benefited from his work, and that will be true of future economists too.

Frank was one of the founders of the Association, and he was the first editor of New Zealand Economic Papers. Throughout the first 50 years of the Association, while Frank was Macarthy Professor of Economics at Victoria University of Wellington, Economics Manager at Tasman Pulp & Paper Ltd., Professor of Money & Finance at VUW, Chair of the New Zealand Planning Council, a business director, and supposedly retired, he has maintained continuous interest in the Associations activities and been a more than occasional participant in them.

It is the range of Frank’s interests which is most impressive. His first contribution to New Zealand Economic Papers was “The Education of an Economist”[1]. Characteristically, Frank arranged for a response to his paper,[2] and it is no accident that the exchange serves as a starting point for a session at this year’s conference. Frank’s educational interests were wider than the education of economists, especially in his advocacy of the concept of human capital and of returns to investment in education to the Currie Commission in the early 1960s, in his work on educational priorities in the Education Development Council of the 1970s, and his long association with the NZ Council for Educational Research. However, of particular interest to the Association is that while during its 50 years the range and depth of economic knowledge has increased enormously, what has been constant is Frank’s advocacy of opportunities for young members to learn and to apply whatever part of it interests them.

The second characteristic of Frank’s engagement with economics and the Association has been his interest in applying economic knowledge. He kept alive as long as possible the earlier ideal of the Economic Society of Australia and New Zealand that it should connect academic economics with business and public life. Similarly, he supported the Australia and New Zealand Association of Science as a vehicle for economists to talk to other disciplines. And within the Association, he sought an outward-looking stance. Specialization is valuable, and economists need to debate among themselves and to hone their tools, but whether dealing with New Zealand’s economic diplomacy, the general stance of policy towards bureaucracy and use of the market, the appropriate framework for monetary policy, or any of the other issues with which Frank has been concerned and with which he has engaged the Association, relating academic ideas to practical issues has been high on his agenda. And we have all benefited from his efforts.

[1] F.W. Holmes, “The Education of an Economist” New Zealand Economic Papers I (1966), pp. 3-17.

[2] Frank Tay “Comment” Ibid pp. 18-23.

It is with great pleasure the Association honours Bob Buckle with the award of life membership of the NZ Association of Economists. Starting with a masters degree from Auckland University Bob has worked as an economist all his career. He has been an active member of the Association in various roles. His work as an economist has moved from private researcher through academic life to public policy (with an international dimension) and now again as an academic leader – currently he is Pro Vice-Chancellor and Dean of Commerce and Administration at Victoria University of Wellington.

He has made valuable research contributions over this sustained career, notably blending micro and macro approaches to the business cycle – an area that has for obvious reasons become fashionable again recently. His publications include modelling business cycles as well as commentary on international structural reform among APEC countries. Bob’s interest in careful, high quality empirical research is widely appreciated.

In making this award we wish to honour Bob for his service to the profession, the New Zealand public service and the Association, in particular. Bob’s contribution to all of these groups has been of the highest quality.

Bob has:

1. Provided numerous acts of high quality service to the Association. He has frequently refereed journal articles of New Zealand Economic Papers, and he has undertaken many functions on behalf of the Association.

2. Organised and facilitated conferences of the Association. In particular he was the convener of the large and successful Sesqui-centential Conference of the Association in Auckland in 1990. And more recently, Bob was a collected and consistently positive Programme Committee co-chair for the 2008 NZAE/ESAM Conference in honour of AW Phillips in Wellington, which produced a glittering array of speakers.

3. Provided service and leadership to the Association by serving as Council Member (1985 to 1993) and President (1989 – 1991).

Bob’s characteristic cool style, allied with quiet effectiveness, have marked all the tasks he has undertaken. He is an ambassador for the New Zealand economics profession and has mentored a generation of students through his teaching and academic leadership. More recently he brought a laid-back but logical approach to international economic relations and again proved highly effective.

His own professional achievements have been marked by the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research Economics Award in 2003. He joins a small but select group who have received this prestigious award.

The Association honours Bob for his broad economic citizenship and has pleasure in awarding him life membership of the Association.

March 2009