Sally is highly skilled in economics, policy development and law. She provides advice to guide government decision-makers to implement strategies, laws and regulations that support economic growth and transformation.

Sally recently took three years out from consulting with Sapere to be the Chief Economist for the Cook Islands Government. This role included working in a small team in charge of the design of the government’s successful economic recovery interventions following the COVID19 pandemic. From being the most heavily impacted economy in the World, the Cook Islands was recently named by ANZ as the Pacific region’s best performing economy (April 2024).

Sally’s interest lays with Pacific economic development, and in particular, the settings that contribute to better banking, expanded digitisation and lower-cost transactions. During her time in the Cook Islands Sally took on the leadership of the country’s e-commerce transformation program, which included planning and prioritisation of laws and regulations providing for digitisation, data protection and paperless trade. She remains part of the Commonwealth Working Group on Legal Reform and Digitalisation for the Asia Pacific region and was recently invited to speak on a panel at UNESCAP’s Paperless Trade Week.

She was also heavily involved in the implementation of changes to telecommunications and utilities regulation in the Cook Islands. Sally also led the Ministry of Finance’s responses to policy proposals in immigration, investment, tax, payments, cryptocurrency and waste management. In 2019 she co-authored a large-scale evaluation of tax reform across 11 Pacific Island nations. Following this, she led a World Bank-funded project to evaluate the role of country taxes and subsidies in protecting the Pacific Ocean.

In addition to Pacific economic development, Sally has had 20 years’ experience consulting for New Zealand government departments, contributing to solving a broad range of economic policy problems. Previous projects have included, for example, measuring the cost of consents for New Zealand’s infrastructure projects, evaluation of the intellectual property protection settings for plant varieties, cost benefit analysis of a national program to protect New Zealand’s biodiversity, a cost benefit analysis of a regional council’s flood management scheme, preparing a regulatory charter for financial markets regulation, and preparing the valuation for a $90 million Treaty settlement.