The Economists and Monetary Thought in Interwar New Zealand: The Gradual Emergence of Monetary Policy Activism

Geoffrey T. F. Brooke, Anthony M. Endres and Alan J. Rogers

History of Economics Review, 2019, vol. 73, issue 1, 14-46

Abstract: The emergence of monetary thought in New Zealand after 1914 has not been subject to extensive analysis. This paper remedies this deficit for the interwar period. The focus is upon the propagation of monetary ideas in New Zealand and their intellectual sources. We apply a heuristic in which different monetary doctrines are situated along a continuum between extreme monetary policy ‘activism’ and extreme ‘minimalism’. In the 1920s, New Zealand economists betrayed a minimalist bias across several dimensions: money supply regulation, the role of money and the international monetary transmission process in the business cycle, and the operation of bank-credit allocation mechanisms. Incipient activism in the work of Condliffe and Belshaw was countered by Niemeyer's case for a minimalist central bank. Fisher adopted an anti-reflationist, forced savings approach to the 1930s crisis. Copland, Tocker, Belshaw and Hight downplayed these consequences. Extended debate over Reserve Bank legislation generated new meanings for the phrase ‘monetary policy independence’; it also turned most economists against extreme activism that prevailed from 1938. Throughout the interwar period, New Zealand entertained a vigorous contest of monetary ideas inherited from the work of Keynes, Hawtrey, Cannan, Robbins, and Hayek, though adapted to local conditions.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/10370196.2019.1665225 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:rherxx:v:73:y:2019:i:1:p:14-46

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/rher20

DOI: 10.1080/10370196.2019.1665225

Access Statistics for this article

History of Economics Review is currently edited by John Harry Bloch and John Hawkins

More articles in History of Economics Review from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().