One of the country’s top-ranking research economists is part of Waikato Management School’s new line-up of economics professors.

A prolific researcher in microeconomics, Dr John Gibson is the highest-ranked New Zealand economist in a league table of 30 star performers in the field from Australian and New Zealand universities. He was placed second in the Macquarie University rankings for research contributions between 1996 and 2002.

Professor Gibson is no stranger to controversy. Together with Grant Scobie – a former Waikato Management School professor, now a Treasury economist - and Trinh Le, who completed a masters degree at the School, Gibson has carried out extensive research on household savings for retirement – a hot topic of public debate.

“We hear a lot about how New Zealanders are not saving enough,” explains Dr Gibson. “But in our research, we saw no compelling evidence to suggest that people approaching retirement in New Zealand are not, on average, saving sufficiently for their retirement, given the presence of New Zealand Superannuation and the existing wealth that they have accumulated. This has important implications for government policy in trying to encourage people to save more.”

Their findings have been recently published as a book, Household Wealth in New Zealand, by the Institute of Policy Studies.

Professor Gibson has also looked into the causes of low wealth among Maori, and has found that compared to the Pakeha population, Maori are younger and that’s the biggest contributor to them having a lower average level of wealth. “In a way, this is good news for New Zealand,” says Dr Gibson. “In time, as the populations of different ethnic groups reach an equilibrium age, we can expect that the wealth gap between ethnic groups will gradually close.”

Dr Gibson is also currently a Senior Research Associate at the Motu Economic and Public Policy Research Trust. His other research interests include poverty measurement, where he is a member of an expert group advising the United Nations Statistical Division, the design and analysis of household survey data, and economic development, especially in China and other Asian and Pacific economies.

He is currently working on two research projects funded by the Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden Fund – a two-year project assessing the accuracy of surveys that rely on long-term recall by their participants and a four-year project looking at the health and wealth effects of migration.