Social policies in the recession

Abstract

While we cannot prevent many of the current recession’s impacts, there are real social policy choices open to policy makers –choices that can reduce its severity, influence who bears what costs, and, importantly, have an impact on the longer-term, post recession outcomes. How well New Zealand performs economically and socially in the years after the current recession is over will depend in part on how well we manage the distributional consequences of the recession and on the social policies implemented during the recession.