How to woo the wealthy

The biggest single source of New Zealand’s business and skilled migrants is the UK, so that country’s policy of how it selects its own migrants is of more than passing interest.

Nearly 6000 such migrants came from the UK in 2009-10 with South Africa next, providing nearly 5000. With the exception of China, the business or skilled category was also the largest for the other major source countries, Philippines, India and Fiji. For China, the numbers were higher for those arriving under family-related schemes.

Under a new UK policy, "super-investors" who are willing to keep £5 million in a UK bank account are to be given the right to stay indefinitely after only three years, two years faster than the five-year wait imposed on every other migrant.

In New Zealand, the “investor plus” category requires a minimum $10 million over three years. Another category requires $2.5 million over four years and proficiency in English. Only 18 such applications for permanent residence were approved in 2009/10. This compares with more than 1000 approvals involving 2600 people under various refugee schemes.

In the UK, a deposit of £10 million will get you the right to stay after only two years. The rules for entrepreneurs are also to be relaxed so that they become eligible within three years if they have created 10 jobs or achieved an annual turnover of £10 million a year for their UK business.

New Zealand’s equivalent requires at least three jobs to be created and a minimum investment of $500,000. These gained just over 100 approvals in 2009/10 and, like the investor categories, are running at half the level of two years earlier.

A lawyer specialising in top-end immigrants to the UK told the Guardian the new rules would double the 275 super-wealthy investors and entrepreneurs who went to live there last year.

So while the New Zealand schemes are little different to the UK’s, clearly competition for these folk is high. Given the size disparities of the two countries’ economies and business opportunities, New Zealand’s policies must be considered uncompetitive and ineffective if the country is more welcoming to refugees than people wanting to start businesses.

Stealing from the future
A new think tank report in the UK has confirmed what many suspect is also the case in New Zealand: That past generations have got more out of the state than they have paid in, while future generations will put in more than they get back.

The Guardian reports:
A child born today will pay £68,000 more in taxes over their lifetime than they get back in pensions and health services. A child born in the next decade will need to pay £160,000 extra, the report said.

It continued: "One might think that, in a steady state, the net contribution would be zero. However, there is a past history of pay-as-you-go benefits, which has allowed earlier generations to receive more from the state than they have contributed over their lifetimes and it is inevitable that there is now a net contribution which has to be paid."

Martin Weale, one of the report's authors and a member of the Bank of England's monetary policy committee, argues that each successive generation is taking more out of the economy than it puts back.

He says the lack of saving by individuals and the government is forcing younger workers to pick up an increasingly large bill for pension and health costs. This is exactly what reviews here by the Savings Working Group and others have been telling the government, which this week raised its deficit prediction in the budget by another $5 billion.

The UK report, Generational Accounting from the National Institute for Economic and Social Reserch, also notes that rocketing land prices, leaving accumulated wealth in the hands of the over-50s, has also meant that younger workers are paying higher mortgage bills than the baby-boomer generation. The property slump may reduce that trend but probably not quickly enough.

Meet John Galt
The curtains have partially lifted on the long-promised film of Ayn Rand's business novel Atlas Shrugged. The expectation it would be a big-budget Hollywood production was always unrealistic, given that Tinsel Town thinks audiences only like anti-business films.

So out went any hope of the libertarian classic having Brangelina in the leading roles, as was once suggested (others have included Clint Eastwood and Rand’s own choice, the late Farrah Fawcett)..

Instead, it has largely unknown actors Taylor Schilling and Grant Bowler in the leads with Paul Johansson both starring and making his directorial debut. One familiar face is Michael O’Keefe (Michael Clayton).

The end result, on what we can see so far, has lots of glossy offices and plenty of talk, rather like Mad Men, in fact. IMDB has only four user reviews, so far, with one of them a rave.

The film is being released to cinemas in the US on April 15, the so-called Tax Day when taxpayers start keeping their earnings for themselves rather than giving them to the state.

Magic for the starving
In a week dominated by reports of a pending atomic apocalypse emanating from Japan, it is comforting to know North Koreans really do prefer circuses to bread.

The Korean Central News Agency reports that the Pyongyanmg Circus will stage a "new form" of magic show in which the aircraft, a bus full of passengers and elephant would be made to disappear. The show also promises “a motorcyclist′s fantastic skill and the magician′s floating in the air as if in a gravity-free space.”

This is at a time when America is still deciding whether to respond to requests for food aid, and the UN’s food and agriculture organisation helps out with an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease.

The Pyongyang Circus has conducted 250 tours around the world and has won more than 70 awards, including 36 gold prizes at 38 international circus festivals.

The magic show will be given its premiere on April 18, during the 27th April Spring Friendship Art Festival, and will then be staged about six times, twice a week.

The venue is May Day Stadium, well known for its mass gymnastic and artistic performance during the "Arirang" Festival that marks the birth of Kim Il-sung.