While most of those other policy changes were highly desirable in the interests of the long-term growth of the New Zealand economy - reductions in protection against imports, reductions in subsidies for exports, privatisation and rationalisation of many heavily over-staffed government trading operations, for example - many of them also had adverse short-term impacts on employment and output.
For this reason, attempts to 3  New Zealand Herald editorial, 3 August 1990. 7  BIS Review 78/1999  calculate the ‘sacrifice ratio’ involved in reducing inflation in New Zealand are almost inevitably doomed to failure. What we know is that employment and output both fell at the beginning of the 1990s.