Many aggregate measures of wellbeing and sustainability exist to guide policy-makers. However, the power of these aggregate measures to predict objective wellbeing outcomes has received little comparative testing. We compile and compare a range of aggregate wellbeing measures including: material...

This paper documents a comprehensive database for the populations of 60 New Zealand towns and cities (henceforth “towns”). Populations are provided for every tenth year from 1926 through to 2006. New Zealand towns have experienced very different growth rates over this period. Economic...

In this paper we link unique data on local social infrastructure expenditure with micro-level individual survey data of self-reported social capital measures of trust and participation in community activities. We use both probit and tobit models to estimate the impact of social infrastructure...

We investigate the effects of homeownership on parents? involvement in local school elections. We use 2007 New Zealand school board of trustees data to examine whether schools where parents have high rates of homeownership experience high parental voting turnout in elections. We also investigate...

This paper analyses the location choices of new entrants to Auckland between 1996 and 2006, to identify a systematic relationship between residential location choices and features of local areas such as population density, the population composition of the area or its neighbourhood,...

This research uses Statistics New Zealand’s Integrated Data Infrastructure and data from the Business Operations Survey to investigate the correlations at the firm level between a) employee characteristics and firm international engagement, and b) firm international engagement and innovation....

Poor productivity performance has been identified as a significant issue for New Zealand, and innovation is seen as a key mechanism for improving productivity growth. Understanding the drivers of firm innovation therefore represents an important step towards improving New Zealand’s economic...