Low Cost Living in the Lone Star State

 

I have spent much of this week in Houston, Texas. Texas is the go-ahead large state in the United States today, and Houston is the oil and gas capital, America’s second largest port and home to a huge medical complex.

With it’s business-friendly environment, Texas is attracting firms and people from other states, notably over-taxed and over-regulated California, in large numbers. It has no state income tax. The state legislature only meets for 8 weeks every two years – and without air-conditioning so that politicians do not get too attracted to the place.

Houston is famous for having no zoning (land regulation). Yet it looks pretty much like many other US cities. Without controls you do not find an oil refinery next to prime residential real estate and the expected collection of businesses cluster around the port. But there are many neighborhood associations that set their own rules about things like how close to a boundary you can build or what colour you can paint your house.

The absence of land supply restrictions makes housing (and much else in Houston) incredibly cheap. You can get a very nice two-garage, four-bedroom house for as little as US $200,000. Some 500,000 ‘refugees’ from New Orleans moved to Houston after Hurricane Katrina without putting any significant pressure on house prices or the land market.

If ever the government gets around to a fundamental review of our dysfunctional Resource Management Act, there would be many lessons to be learned from Houston.

Home thoughts from abroad

Melbourne University professor and member of the 2025 Taskforce Judith Sloan has an excellent article in The Australian today.

Entitled ‘New Zealand seems to have lost track of its reform agenda’, she writes:

New Zealanders are good at lots of things. Rugby, sailing, rowing, netball and film-making all spring to mind. But running a national economy does not appear to be one of their strengths.

On the income gap with Australia, she says:

Some commentators attribute New Zealand’s poor economic performance to its small size and distance from markets. The trouble with this explanation is [that] New Zealand has always been small and distant and so these characteristics cannot explain the growing gap.

She puts a finger on a key problem:

In Australia, there is broad-based acknowledgement of the benefits of the reforms undertaken by the Hawke-Keating and Howard governments. These involved removing import protection, financial sector deregulation, privatisation and other pro-competition measures.

By contrast,

New Zealand suffers from the consequences of an incomplete reform agenda. Public ownership remains prevalent, statutory marketing arrangements are still in place and the labour market has been re-regulated. There is even a single desk (monopoly) for the export of kiwi fruit.

Many New Zealanders think of Australia as a big government country, with governments at federal, state and local levels.

But as Judith points out:

The overall size of the public sector is considerably greater in New Zealand than in Australia. General government outlays as a percentage of GDP are around 45 per cent in New Zealand, some 10 percentage points higher than in Australia. Even if cyclical factors are taken into account, the relative size of the public sector in New Zealand is considerably larger than in Australia and has been growing particularly strongly since 2005, well before the GFC.

And the point here is that:

While there are exceptions, the higher the level of government activity in a country, the lower the rate of economic growth. And there is no example of a country with a public sector of equivalent size to NZ that has grown at the sustained rates needed to eliminate the per capita income gap between the two countries.

The article goes on to talk about New Zealand’s inferior policies such as interest-free student loans, ownership of KiwiRail, the Resource Management Act and the lack of public private partnerships: these “are almost unheard of in New Zealand.” Judith pinpoints the risks for New Zealand:

[T]he spanner in the works relates to the fact that New Zealand and Australia essentially have a common labour market. Trans-Tasman migration is completely unfettered. As a consequence of the income gap between the two countries, the flow of migrants is almost completely one-way, to the point that there are now about half a million New Zealanders living in Australia.

The consequences for New Zealand of this flow of people are both economic and social. Economic in the sense that there is little return to New Zealand for the investment in its citizens’ early years, and social in the sense that children (and grandchildren) live at a distance from their parents (grandparents) and possibly even barrack for the Wallabies!

She notes that the Key government has made modest moves in the right direction:

But if the aim is to close the gap with Australia by 2025 — and the taskforce of which I am a member will be recommending how to achieve this objective — modest policy is not nearly good enough.

Wise counsel from a good friend of this country.

  

O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us

To see oursels as others see us!

 

The full article is here