No more free beer tomorrow? Economic policy and outcomes in Australia and New Zealand 1984-2003

In this chapter, we compare the experience of Australia and New Zealand over the period of microeconomic reform that began in the early 1980s. Of particular concern is the question of how New Zealand, with what were seen at the time as the ‘best’ set of economic policies in the OECD, experienced the worst set of economic outcomes, and why Australia, from a broadly similar starting position, did so much better. That the outcomes indeed have differed significantly was perhaps not conclusively clear in earlier work (Easton and Gerritsen (1996), Quiggin (1996), Hazledine (1998), Quiggin (1996)), but we are by now in a position to update the earlier comparisons with the advantage of what is now two full decades of history since the major ‘reform’ processes were set in train