Bureaucrats outnumber teachers and researchers

For each staff member who does teaching and research in New Zealand, there are now two administrators, a new book reveals.

Roger Bowden, professor of economics and finance at Victoria University in Wellington, also argues in his new book The Economic State of the Nation that profligate government spending does more harm than good and that a large bureaucracy is slowly suffocating the good things in our economy.

His book takes a swipe at the way universities are run. He calculates, for example, that some 60 percent of the budget for public research funding is now taken up with administration costs.

And, in a recent opinion piece for the New Zealand Centre for Political Research, Dr Bowden argues that the tertiary sector in this country is "decaying", universities are being micro-managed "into intellectual extinction" and the "Tertiary Education Commission has become part of a problem it should be trying to fix".

He argues that "with the education our ... universities are churning out, it's hard to see in many cases that any sort of capital is being produced, or if it is, in the right sort of disciplines and numbers".

"To be sure, we will technically still do quite well on exporting education via foreign students, even it is drying up a bit, but the real story on that is that we are importing residence rights, not exporting education services."

He also calls for further spending on scientific research, a rethink of the way that the money is allocated, and where it goes.

Further information on The Economic State of the Nation is at this web page.

Dr Bowden’s opinion piece is at this web page.