A Waikato University professor of strategy and human resource management Mark Harcourt says that raising the minimum wage, as Labour is proposing, would likely have little or no impact on either employment or prices, while giving low-wage workers a lot more income.

Professor Harcourt says all employers pay it.”The minimum wage takes wages at the bottom end of the labour market out of competition and so its negative impacts on prices and employment, if they exist at all, are negligible.

“An increase could even stimulate the economy by putting more money into the hands of people most likely to spend it. Certainly, any negative repercussions of raising the minimum wage, to the extent they exist at all, would be puny compared to the foreign debt-fuelled house price bubble of the 2000s.”