The concepts of social-market economy are well established in the Nordic countries, which by many measures have excelled when compared to the more neoliberal democracies. The social-market economy combines market-based outcomes with regulation and direct intervention to achieve desired societal outcomes.
The goal of the regulations is to alter the operation of commercial markets to acknowledge there are important non-market implications associated with the operation of those markets, to address market failures whereby the operation of the market fails to deliver adequate price signals to businesses (such as the environmental costs of production, or the social costs of land banking).
Over the last three decades, the Treasury, and other government entities such as the Productivity Commission, consistently applied a neoliberal lens when assessing government policies. However, there is new research and guidelines from Treasury that suggest some shift in thinking towards the social-market economy.
As well as the paper on Monitoring Intergenerational Wellbeing, Treasury has released its Living Standards Framework.
The Living Standards Framework research was begun in 2011 under the previous National Government, but the framework has only become a core guide to economic policy advice under the current Labour government.
The framework encompasses environmental, human, social and market resources. This shows much wider scope for policy evaluation than is outlined in the traditional Treasury guidelines, including those on housing policies. The framework also reveals strong parallels with the Resource Management Act, with its focus on social and economic and cultural wellbeing and sustainable environmental management.
More recently, the Treasury has released research which measures the wellbeings outlined in the framework. This is likely to bring a significant shift in policy advice.
During 2013 to 2016, the future directions of our two largest urban economies were examined through the Independent Hearing Panel to set a new Auckland Unitary Plan. Christchurch's hearing was to set out its recovery path after the 2011 earthquakes. Both hearings were held in the context of a major housing 'crisis'.
While it did accept most of the panel's recommendations, the Auckland Council pushed back against allowing houses to be built on a near-intact volcanic cone at Crater Hill, and on an area of high environmental value at Okura. Two appeals to the Environment Court were not long in coming.
The Environment Court rejected both appeals. It determined that significant environmental and social costs would not be offset by increases in housing capacity which would be very small in the context of the very substantial growth capacity provided by the Auckland Unitary Plan.
In similar vein, in 2016 the Court upheld Mackenzie District's ability to limit farm intensification in order to protect landscape and ecological values.
The three cases each involved important non-market aspects on which the community places great value — the outstanding high-country landscape in Mackenzie basin, Crater Hills environmental values and cultural importance (especially to Te Ākitai Waiohua), and environmental significance of the Okura coastal area.
All three decisions upheld the importance of those non-market values. In every case, the court specifically rejected economic evidence which held to the neoliberal view that economic assessment should be constrained to market outcomes. In the Okura decision, the court concluded "we find that non-market costs ... should be taken into account in the overall economic evaluation".
This apparent rise of the social-market tide in institutional thinking is to be welcomed. The wellbeing of society is not defined simply by market transactions or income. Rather, much of the New Zealand community's wellbeing is driven by the non-market values of our environmental, cultural and social resources.
• Rodney Yeoman is an associate director and Douglas Fairgray director of a Takapuna-based consultancy, Market Economics Ltd.
