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Observers have noted that New Zealanders are less inequality averse and less in favour of redistribution than one would expect given actual levels of income and wealth inequality in the country. Attempted explanations have been unsatisfying, partly because of a lack of an explicit comparative focus. This paper uses four waves of the World Value Survey (2000–2020) and compares New Zealand views with those of respondents in 18 other high-income OECD states. New Zealanders across the board are indeed outliers, but this is explained by the extensive experience of intergenerational educational mobility of successive NZ cohorts. New Zealanders also believe that their society is characterised by a large degree of equality of opportunity and this overrides any concern that they might have about inequality of outcomes. While there may also be other ideational and institutional factors to consider, a series of hierarchical binomial logit regressions confirm that experiences and perceptions of upward mobility must be part of any explanation of New Zealand idiosyncrasies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Evaluation is grounded in academically imperialistic research methodologies, paradigms, and epistemologies, which have lasting effects on individuals and communities, namely social and economic inequalities. These research methodologies, paradigms, and epistemologies are largely Westernized;1 that is, influenced by Western (North American and European) cultural, economic, and political systems. To confront the Westernization of evaluation, scholars call for decolonization, to produce locallydetermined, strengths-based, culturally-situated, and valid understandings. This endeavor is complicated, requiring a paradigm shift for Westernized evaluators. Purpose: In this paper, we describe an anticolonial culturally responsive framework (ACRF) occurring in the intersections between two evaluation approaches. The first, approach, culturally responsive evaluation (CRE), demands culturally situated evaluation to determine appropriate goals and outcomes. The second, a decolonizing framework (DF), includes approaches that challenge Westernized methodologies and epistemologies, and simultaneously vitalizes Indigenous knowledge production to advance Indigenous sovereignty. By merging these two approaches, the ACRF honors decolonizing without displacing the authority of Indigeneity, while simultaneously foregrounding the interweaving of evaluator, evaluand, and cultural context. Further, we situate the ACRF as an invitation to interrogate academic imperialism—the processes and ideologies that produce and reproduce social inequality in evaluations. Setting: We write as methodologists from the United States, having been trained in and currently working in universities built on Indigenous lands through the exploitation of forced labor and enslavement. We have conducted evaluations and research in the United States, Aotearoa / New Zealand, and Cambodia, settler colonial and colonized countries. Data Collection and Analysis: We draw on scholars who have advanced culturally responsive, decolonizing, and anticolonial evaluation and methodological fields. Findings: The anticolonial culturally responsive framework is an invitation for evaluators trained in imperialistic Westernized approaches or who embody the colonial world through our race, language, knowledge, and culture. Our goal is not to displace the primacy and urgency of vitalizing Indigenous and decolonizing frameworks. Instead, we offer a tentative approach committed to pluriversality, justice, selfdetermination, and the possibility of collaboration between knowledge systems and knowers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New Zealanders can cross borders freely, work and live in Australia indefinitely thanks to the Trans‐Tasman Travel Agreement. This paper uses a recently developed decomposition method to decompose the weekly wage gap at various quantiles on the wage distribution between New Zealand‐born (NZ‐born) and Australian‐born workers, and between NZ‐born workers, migrants from other English speaking countries (OESC), and from non‐English speaking countries (NESC) to determine how free and regulated migration influences migrants' performance in the Australian labour market. We found that NZ‐born workers earned higher weekly wages than both Australian‐born and NESC workers but earned lower wages than OESC migrants. Differences in endowment were primarily responsible for the wage gaps between NZ‐born and Australian‐born workers and between NZ‐born and OESC migrants. However, differences in returns to worker and job characteristics are mainly responsible for the wage gap between NZ‐born and NESC migrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the impact of homogamy on the distribution of household income in New Zealand at the national level and across different sized cities. We focus on homogamy by age, education, hours worked, employment status, and migration status. We present a new index of homogamy that takes account of maximum potential homogamy. Our index is less sensitive to categories with small population shares than the commonly used concentration ratios. We compare the inequality impact of actual matching with that of randomized matching by means of the additional randomization method. Contrary to public perception, homogamy of the highly educated has declined relative to random matching. Nonetheless, homogamy has had an inequality‐increasing impact on the distribution of income and this effect has grown over time: from around 5% of the mean log deviation (MLD) measure of income inequality in 1986 to 16% in 2013. Allowing for simulated labor supply responses reduces this effect by less than 1%. Spatially, the effect of homogamy is larger and increases more in metropolitan areas than in other urban areas. In Auckland, New Zealand's largest city (around a third of the population), homogamy accounted for a fifth of MLD inequality by 2013, up from 6% in 1986. Educational homogamy plays the biggest role in this process, but the effects of hours worked, employment status and migration status are relatively important too. Homogamy by age has little effect on income inequality. Using the Gini index as an alternative inequality measure yields similar results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores poverty income dynamics in the form of income mobility by the poor and poverty persistence, making use of simple diagrams. It seeks to illustrate the extent to which income mobility is pro‐poor and when mobility is associated with persistence below, or movement across, a poverty line over a specified time period. While statistical measures can be used to examine detailed characteristics of income dynamics, two simple diagrams are shown to capture the extent of pro‐poor mobility and poverty persistence respectively in ways that allow convenient comparisons. These are referred to as a ‘three Is of mobility’ curve, and a ‘poverty persistence curve’, The curves are illustrated using anonymised Inland Revenue longitudinal individual income data for New Zealand over 2006–2010. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the potential effects on inequality and poverty of a minimum wage increase, based on a microsimulation model that captures the details of household composition and the income tax and welfare benefit system and allows for labour supply responses. Results suggest that, largely due to the composition of household incomes, a policy of increasing the minimum wage has a relatively small effect on the inequality of income per adult equivalent person, and a money metric utility measure, using several inequality indices. Hence, the minimum wage policy does not appear to be particularly well targeted, largely due to many low wage earners being secondary earners in higher income households, while many low income households have no wage earners at all. These results are reinforced when allowing for wage spillovers further up the wage distribution. Nevertheless, a minimum wage increase can have a more substantial effect on some poverty measures for sole parents in employment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the impact off fifteen years of economic and social change on income inequality and poverty in New Zealand. The paper considers how a consensual poverty line was established through the use of a series of focus groups. This leads into a discussion on who was poor in 1998. Problems in measuring trends in the incidence and severity of poverty during a period when economic growth is absent and the income distribution is widening are then analysed. The discussion briefly incorporates current New Zealand debates on benefit dependency, intergenerational transmission of poverty and social exclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With many fiscal policies likely to have quite different age/gender incidences, this paper examines age and gender dimensions of income distribution and fiscal incidence in New Zealand using Household Economic Survey data for 2010. Applying, and testing, an intra-household income sharing rule, our evidence suggests strong life-cycle and gender aspects to fiscal incidence. Net tax liabilities are found to be low and negative, at younger and older ages but positive during much of the 'working age.' Notwithstanding considerable within-gender heterogeneity, women are found on average to have systematically and persistently lower net fiscal liabilities than men, especially at older ages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Decisions regarding personal income tax and transfer reforms are inevitably subject to value judgements. Hence, there is a crucial role for policy analysis in which the implications of clearly expressed values are considered. Tax models play a central role in such analyses. This paper reviews a number of tax models and illustrates their use in the context of the New Zealand income tax and transfer system. It is suggested that the appropriate economic models vary according to: the precise ways in which the policy question is formulated; the underlying behavioural responses to taxation expected across the taxpaying population; the precise definitions of key variables such as income inequality; and the specification of policy objectives such as redistribution, revenue‐raising or tax efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on unit record data from four household surveys conducted by Statistics New Zealand for the years 1983/1984, 1991/1992, 1995/1996 and 1997/1998, this paper addresses some ethnic dimensions of income inequality among New Zealanders over the period of the surveys. It applies alternative techniques of decomposition of the Gini coefficient of inequality by subgroups of population. It then analyses how changes in the incomes of specific population subgroups affect the overall inequality. The results help quantify the economic distances among the different ethnic populations of New Zealand, and indicate how and why these distances have been changing over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent tests of the Convergence Hypothesis, or the tendency for per capita income levels to narrow over time, have included a time-series testing approach (see Bernard & Durlauf, 1995, 1996; Oxley & Greasley, 1995, Greasley & Oxley, 1997, 1998a). Results have been mixed, with Bernard & Durlauf finding no evidence of convergence whereas Oxley & Greasley find evidence of two small convergence clubs. This paper adds to the debate by considering a newly created annual per capita income series for New Zealand, 1870-1993. The results show that the series is integrated of order 1, I(1), and neither a single break nor joint breaks overturn the null of a unit root. Combined with results from Greasley & Oxley (1998a, 1998b), this property of New Zealand data is incompatible with her belonging to a UK/Australia convergence club, or converging towards either of the North American economies. New Zealand per capita income growth is idiosyncratic, diverging below the growth rates of traditional trading partners. A conjunction of small size and insular economic policies distinguishes New Zealand's economic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The social security systems of Australia and New Zealand have traditionally rejected social insurance in favour of a means-tested categorical safety net approach that provides considerable scope for targeting. The experience of both countries provides many examples of how targeting can be used to constrain social security spending, and these have attracted interest in other countries keen to contain the growth in their social security budgets. However, although there are many similarities between the two systems, there are also many differences and these have become greater as targeting has gathered momentum over the last two decades. This paper analyses how targeting has been used in each country as a way of illustrating the different approaches adopted. Attention is focused on how the retirement income systems of the two countries illustrate an increasing policy divergence, with the planned Australian transition to a "multi-pillar" approach in contrast to the constant (and continuing) reform of New Zealand superannuation. Household data on the pattern of receipt of transfer incomes and their impact on the distribution of income are then used to explore the impact of targeting since the early 1980s. This analysis suggests that, in practice, targeting has had a far smaller impact on income inequality in both countries than is often claimed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the relationship between house prices, the wealth distribution and wealth inequality. It considers long-term changes in overall wealth distribution in New Zealand and the share of wealth that is held in the form of housing. It also explores the potential impact of large increases in house prices using a ‘scenario’ approach – modelling the effect of house price growth scenarios on the 2018 wealth distribution and, in turn, wealth inequality, while holding all else constant. The article shows how looking at headline measures can obscure changes in wealth inequality between groups. It also reinforces the value of complementing such analysis with measures that illustrate other dimensions of wellbeing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We conduct an economy-wide analysis of the association between trade and wages in New Zealand and decompose the influence of imports on relative wages by sector and region. We find that increased imports resulted in a small increase in wage inequality but this rise was offset by downward pressure on the skill premium due to increased exports. In aggregate, we observe that increased openness (rising imports and exports) decreased New Zealand wage inequality. We also find that imports from developed nations resulted in a greater increase in the New Zealand skill premium than imports from developing nations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses income distribution changes in New Zealand between 1983 and 1998. We use a semi-parametric kernel density approach and a range of inequality summary measures to assess the distributional effects of changes in five sets of factors: household structure, National Superannuation (old age pension), socio-demographic attributes, employment outcomes, and ‘economic returns’ to such attributes and employment outcomes. Changes in household structure and attributes are the main factors contributing to the rise in inequality. Employment changes and changing returns had a more modest impact. The results are qualitatively robust to a variety of equivalization, income, and weighting measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including the developments related to gender equality in the public service sector of New Zealand, the trends in income distribution, and gender issues in pay rates ad employment.

Abstract: Trends in income inequality are increasingly being discussed by economists and policy makers. In New Zealand, income inequality indices increased during the late 1980s and early 1990s, with limited change thereafter. But little is known about the levels and changes of such indices over prior decades. Based on previously unexplored data from Statistics New Zealand Official Yearbooks and Inland Revenue, this article reports estimates for the Gini index of income inequality for New Zealand from the mid‐1930s to the present. Comparisons with estimates for Australia for 1942–2001 reveal some remarkable commonalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘Living’ wage campaigns are more than calls for higher basic minima rates of pay. They are predicated on the notion that there is a discrete income below which people risk further deprivation, but above which there should be a qualitative upward shift in human capability. Problematically, however, the theory of diminishing marginal returns predicts that the function linking freedom from deprivation with income will form a smooth curve with no clear pivot (i.e. no discrete ‘living’ wage at all). Living wages thus remain controversial in that tests of these competing views are rare. A cross-sectional online survey of over 1000 working adults in New Zealand was undertaken to explore these two competing propositions. Household income was compared with measures of life and work capability. It emerged that the function linking life and work capabilities to household income was ‘spiked’ rather than continuous; the spike traversed scalar midpoints (e.g. from job dissatisfaction to satisfaction), making the shift qualitative (because dissatisfaction is qualitatively different from satisfaction) and the pivot point coincided with more people reporting having enough (versus insufficient) incomes to meet their basic needs. These findings are consistent with the arguments that there is a wage above which workers can begin to develop their capabilities rather than their being no such income point as suggested by the theory of diminishing marginal returns. Its existence has implications for public policy makers, and for wage theory. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents an overview of the income inequality of men and women in New Zealand. The topics discussed include the crucial roles of salaries and wages in the income inequality in the country, the attributing factors of the greatest income inequality extremes, and the rise of income inequality cases in the country.

The article presents the message of Tim Hazledine, the co-author of the book "The Spirit Level," during the lecture held at the University of Auckland in May 2014, in New Zealand. The topics discussed include less support given by New Zealanders on the redistribution of income, the presence of income inequality in the country, and the rise of inequality cases in the nation.

The article offers information on the inequality of wealth among the generation X in New Zealand. The topics discussed include the implications of the 1989-1992 recession on the labor market, the composition of the gross assets of individuals aged 38 years old, and the distribution of networth of the people in the country.

The article discusses the Treasury's Living Standards Framework and the approach to equity which it enunciates in New Zealand. Topics covered include the three principal arguments about income inequality such as social mobility, an increase in incomes in New Zealand since the mid-1980s, and the five fronts in which the policy options for living standards should be evaluated. Also mentioned is participation in society as central to equity.

The article discusses a study done on a correlation between income inequalities and poverty in New Zealand. The study results show that overall household income inequality and poverty moved in tandem, showing a significant relationship between the two. However, the authors claim that this relationship is complex and childhood poverty does not completely follow this trend and there are variations depending on what measurement used.

In New Zealand, Maori students have lower educational attainment levels than their Pakeha counterparts, which is a major contributor to the earnings inequality between these two groups. This study attempts to identify determinants of the gap in educational attainment using data on reading test scores for a sample of 3031 15-year-old Maori and Pakeha students. Using a decomposition method that is commonly applied to income inequality analyses, the determinants of the reading literacy test score gap between Maori and Pakeha students are identified. The main contributors to this gap are family factors, student's opinions, and school factors (including decile). An understanding of the determinants of the test score gap provides insights into how effective policy makers can be at reducing this inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses changes in the distributions of working-age individuals' earnings and total income in New Zealand over the period 1998–2004. We find that there have been broad gains in income across the distribution, suggesting the spoils of growth have been shared widely. Mean and median earnings increased 15 and 23 per cent respectively, while mean and median income increased 12–13 per cent. Inequality, as measured by the Gini coefficient, was more stable: earnings inequality fell 4 per cent, while income inequality was unchanged. The main drivers of the changes were employment and real wage growth. We estimate that roughly one-half of the growth in average incomes was due to employment growth, and one-quarter each to demographic changes and wage growth. The relative employment and wage contributions varied across the income distribution: employment growth dominated gains at the lower end of the distribution, while wage gains dominated changes at the higher end. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Study objective: To investigate whether the income distribution in a Russian region has a "contextual" effect on individuals' self rated health, and whether the regional income distributions are related to regional health differences. Methods: The Russia longitudinal monitoring survey (RLMS) is a survey (n = 7696) that is representative of the Russian population. With multilevel regressions both individual as well as contextual effects on self rated health were estimated. Main results: The effect of income inequality is not negative on men's self rated health as long as the level of inequality is not very great. When inequality levels are high, however, there is a tendency for men's health to be negatively affected. Regional health differences among men are in part explained by regional income differences. On the other hand, women do not seem to be affected in the same way, and individual characteristics like age and educational level seem to be more important. Conclusions: It seems that a rise in income inequality has no negative effect on men's self rated health as long as the level of inequality is not very great. On the other hand, when inequality levels are higher a rise tends to affect men's health negatively. A curvilinear relation between self rated health and income distribution is an interesting hypothesis. It could help to explain the confusing results that arise when you look at countries with a high degree of income inequality (USA) and those with lower income inequality (for example, Japan and New Zealand). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The responses in New Zealand to the opportunities of refrigeration transformed farming in the Dominion during the half-century from 1890. Closer settlement and the extension of the cultivated area combined with more intensive farming methods to increase land productivity and real gross domestic product capita to the extent that living standards in New Zealand measured by the Human Development Index ranked first in the world by 1913. In contrast, real wages in the Dominion stagnated. The refrigeration-related trade boom had powerful income distribution effects that increased sharply the land rental–wage ratio during the years to 1920. Widely diffuse land ownership in New Zealand tempered the rise in income inequality, to set the Dominion apart from other land-abundant economies of the periphery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyses social choice and social market in the context of education reform in an era of increasing inequality in New Zealand. It has been held that the growing social and economic inequalities of New Zealand society have their echoes in growing educational gaps. This means that social and economic changes impinge both directly, through such things as housing patterns and community resources and indirectly, through perceptions of aspiration and opportunity, on schooling systems and on students. For the period under review here, income inequalities had continued to rise in New Zealand and for most of that time real incomes for the majority had fallen. It was observed that wealth and poverty, atleast within the larger cities had become more concentrated. Patterns of wealth and deprivation have reinforced processes of school segregation that have occurred under politics of school choice. Over the last few ears a range of social and educational policies had been developed to mitigate the worst effects of market policies. It has been argued that until the earning gap is closed and in particular until child poverty is addressed through increases in social security, there is little chance that educational outcomes for deprived young people would improve significantly.

Background: Socioeconomic inequalities in mental health have been shown in a number of populations. This study aims to investigate the association between asset wealth and psychological distress in New Zealand and whether it is independent of other socioeconomic measures and baseline health status. Methods: Data for this study were from the first three waves of the Survey of Families, Income and Employment (SoFIE) conducted in New Zealand (2002-2004/05) (n = 15 340). The Kessler-10 was used as a measure of psychological distress. The association of quintiles of wealth with psychological distress was investigated using logistic regression, controlling for confounders, socioeconomic variables and prior health status. Results: The odds ratio (OR) of reporting high psychological distress were greater in the lowest wealth quintile compared with the highest (OR 3.06, 95% CI 2.68 to 3.50). Adjusting for age and sex did not alter the relationship; however, adjusting for income and area deprivation attenuated the OR to 1.73 (95% CI 1.48 to 2.04). Further controlling for baseline health status reduced the OR to 1.45 (95% CI 1.23 to 1.71), although the confidence interval still excluded the null. Conclusions: Inequalities in wealth are strongly associated with psychological distress, over and above other confounding demographic variables and baseline health status. Much, but not all, of that association is confounded by adult socioeconomic position. This suggests that policy measures to improve asset wealth, through savings and home ownership, may have positive health implications and help to reduce health inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]