Sir Roderick Deane - Speech to CSNZ 75th Anniversary Dinner Wellington - 7 September 2012

Reflections on Corporate Governance

It is interesting to recall that in the mid 1980s New Zealand survived a foreign exchange crisis not unlike that which faces a number of European countries today. As it happens, the Euro assigns a single exchange rate to all its individual member countries which is not determined by their own individual economic situations but rather by the state of the Euro zone as a whole.

So the profligacy of the governments of Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Spain, the so-called PIGS, has induced severe imbalances in their economies remarkably similar in kind to that which we faced almost 30 years ago.

Our response to that crisis, and it was indeed a crisis, was to re-join the world by freeing up our amazing array of restrictive and regulatory policies and pursuing a commonsense bunch of fiscal, monetary and exchange rate policies. The results were an initial period of painful adjustment followed by a lengthy period, 1988 to the early 2000s, when we achieved the fastest growth rate in productivity (i.e. output per person and per unit of capital) we had recorded for very many decades and indeed one of the best performances in the OECD at that time ... READ MORE