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.