People

Carl Bakker

Carl provides insightful economic, policy and investment advice. He established Acuo in 2010 and has over 35 years experience working across a wide variety of sectors and organizations. He is often used to provide strategic advice or to help lead reviews of complex economic or financial challenges and has recently led work developing outcome-based contracts and delivering social-impact investments.

He is also active in governance roles, as chairman of G-Fund and a director of a rapidly growing NZ high-tech company, Taska Prosthetics.

Clients Carl has advised in recent years include: NZ Treasury, Housing New Zealand, Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, Ministry of Health, Earthquake Commission, Civil Aviation Authority, Community Housing Aotearoa, Auckland Council, APM Workcare, SKM, CERA, Ministry of Transport, NZ Transport Agency, Ministry of Education, Department of Corrections, Ministry for Primary Industry, and Statistics NZ. Services provided include:

• Strategic reviews, at both whole organization and wider sector strategy levels;
• Leading advice on asset investment and divestment, including accreditation as an expert business case reviewer;
• development of outcomes-based contracts and social-impact investment proposals;
• Analysis and advice on regulatory and public policy issues, including economic cost-benefit and public policy analysis;
• Management of negotiations on complex and contentious policy and commercial issues; and
• Economic and regulatory policy analysis.

Prior to establishing Acuo Carl had roles including:

• Director, National Infrastructure Unit, The Treasury, where he led the development of a strategic infrastructure policy
• Advisor, Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, where he gave the Prime Minister advice on education, labour market and state-sector issues
• Director, The Treasury.  This included commercial roles as well as social policy. In the social sector, this included several roles leading teams providing policy and financial advice across education, health, labour markets and longer term research. In more commercially aligned roles, Carl led teams that managed the performance of SoEs, developed new regulatory approaches to airports and roading, managed sales processes, and implemented partial privatisation of the ACC.

Carl has a Bachelor of Engineering (Honours) from University of Canterbury, a Bachelor of Commerce from University of Canterbury, and has completed an Advanced Economics course at the London School of Economics. He is an accredited expert Better Business case reviewer.

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