Motu Economic and Public Policy Research is New Zealand’s leading non-profit economic and public policy research institute. The organizatioin is fully independent. The reputation is based on the work to not be compromised by any expressed ideology or political position.

History

The organisation is Motu, and it was first dreamed up at Harvard University in the early 1990s, when a group of Kiwi graduate students, including Motu senior fellows Suzi Kerr and Dave Maré, discussed a vision to return to New Zealand and dedicate themselves full-time to independent public policy research. They saw non-political research institutes in the United States, where cutting-edge research was funded by grants and donations and wanted to create a New Zealand equivalent – to fill a hole of non-ideological contributions to economics and public policy.

Motu was registered as a charitable trust on 1 September 2000 and in 2002 was accepted as an affiliate organisation of the Royal Society of New Zealand. Motu now has 20 staff and is the top-ranked research organisation in New Zealand, according to the Research Papers in Economics (RePEc) website, which ranks all economists and economic research organisations in the world based on the quantity and quality of their research publications. According to RePEc, Motu has five of the top 25 individual researchers, including Director Adam Jaffe who is the top-ranked economist in Oceania/Australasia.

What began as a plucky upstart breaking away from the traditional mould in Suzi Kerr's house in Island Bay, is now a mature and well-respected organisation that attracts top Kiwi and international talent: Adam Jaffe was previously on the faculty of Harvard and Brandeis Universities in the United States, a Senior Economist for the U.S. President’s Council of Economic Advisors, and a member of the UN climate-change organisation awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. Senior Fellow Arthur Grimes is the former Chair of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand.

Objectives

Since Motu was founded in September 2000, our objectives have remained the same. As a charitable trust, we were established to promote well informed and reasoned debate on public policy issues relevant to New Zealand decision making. To this end we are committed to three broad goals: research, capacity building and dissemination.