Our Story
E ngā rangatira mā, haere mai koutou ki tēnei rourou mo ā māua mahi. Kia ora tātou katoa.
For more than two decades, we were Professors of Economics employed in the Agribusiness and Economics Research Unit, the AERU, at Lincoln University. Caroline was Director between 2001 and 2024. Paul was Deputy Director from 2010 and was Director with Caroline in 2023 and in 2024.
The mission of the AERU was: To exercise leadership in research for sustainable wellbeing. We worked with leaders in New Zealand’s Agrifood export sector (including Manawa Honey, who provided the T-shirts!) to identify opportunities for creating and capturing greater value for producers in Aotearoa New Zealand. Our slogan was, “Not an ounce of product should leave our shores at a commodity price”.
At the AERU, we completed research projects on economic development, national and regional economic strategies, social investment impact assessments and non-market valuations. We contributed to international research organisations. Caroline was President of the Agricultural Economic Society (2019-2021) and Paul was Country Ambassador for the Regional Studies Association (2017-222).
Our time in the AERU was enormously rich. We worked with wonderful colleagues within the AERU and the wider Lincoln University community, far too many to list. We worked with researchers from other institutions, including international scholars, to create new knowledge designed to have economic, environmental, social and cultural impact. We partnered with industry, policy, iwi and community organisations to design mission-led solutions for addressing major challenges.
We were honoured to receive several honours and awards for our research in the AERU, although our biggest satisfaction was seeing people use our research to expand their capabilities for wellbeing. In 2018, we wrote a book with Dr Joe Saunders (now an academic at Durham University) on the capabilities approach to prosperity. Wellbeing Economics was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2018 and is free to download. It has been accessed more than 100,000 times.
We also wrote a review article with Dr John Reid (University of Canterbury) and Andrew McCallum (Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment) on our research, published in the Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand in 2024. Entitled Knowledge, mātauranga and science: reflective learning from the interface, this article is also free to download.
At the end of 2024, we retired from Lincoln University. We are still active as economists in Aotearoa New Zealand. Paul, for example, volunteers as Research Economist for the Wellbeing Economy Alliance Aotearoa. Caroline is a leader in the large research programme, Carbon sequestration in New Zealand's southern fjords, hosted in the Department of Geology at the University of Otago.
We set up this website in 2025 with the wonderful help of Kit Hindin at New Media Design. Our purpose is to provide a public record of some of our previous and current research and to provide an easy point of contact for people who might want to engage with our work.
We say a little more about ourselves on our home pages: