Alan Greenspan, chairman of the US central bank, has on several occasions suggested that price stability obtains when economic agents - businesses and private individuals - no longer take account of the prospective change in the general price level in their economic decision-making. It is clear that we still have a little way to go. What about New Zealanders’ expectations for economic growth?
Are these too quite unrealistic? I believe that they are, at least based on current policies and attitudes. In the early 1990s, New Zealand achieved real economic growth of more than 5 percent per annum for two years in succession.