NZ Inflation Research Discussed in NY Times

“What’s worse, higher inflation or higher unemployment?” Peter Coy asks in The New York Times. “The answer is actually pretty straightforward: Higher unemployment is worse than higher inflation if you go by the feelings of real people rather than the theories of economists. A paper by three New Zealanders that’s forthcoming in the Journal of Money, Credit and Banking taps into results from the Gallup World Poll from 2005 to 2019, covering 1.5 million people in 141 nations.

“The poll includes questions about how people feel about their lives and their current situations. The researchers correlate how people answered those questions with economic conditions at the time in each country,” Coy writes.

“The findings are remarkable.”

The authors of the paper are University of Auckland Business School’s Robert MacCulloch and Lina El-Jahel, and Hamed Shafiee, a senior adviser to the New Zealand Productivity Commission.

Original article by Peter Coy, The New York Times, July 20, 2022.