The dairy industry is a major contributor to both the New Zealand economy as a whole and to the Waikato regional economy in particular. The industry is experiencing a period of considerable change, with increases in dairy conversion, increased intensification, and increasing use of nitrogen...

The future of the Hurunui River and its catchment has been hotly contested between those who seek to store and/or divert water from the river in order to increase agricultural production and those who would like to see the river undeveloped and the quality of natural resources in the river and...

Under “tenure review,” the ongoing privatization of South Island Crown pastoral leases, a pastoral lessee surrenders part of his leasehold, and acquires a freehold interest in the remainder. In order to determine whether the Crown sold the right to freehold too cheaply, we model the...

The New Zealand Institute of Economic Research (NZIER) has conducted and published a quarterly survey of business opinion continuously, and with largely unchanged questions, since June 1961. The Institute’s Quarterly Survey of Business Opinion (QSBO) is a business tendency survey based...

Data on the flow of workers moving between employment, unemployment and non-participation provide some of the most interesting and useful insights into labour market outcomes. These insights include information on the number and probability of workers moving between labour market states from,...

This paper analyses the direct and subsequent flow-on expenditure resulting from the week-long National Masters Hockey Tournament held in Hamilton, New Zealand in March 2009. During the tournament, information was collected on the expenditure from a sample of participating players and officials...

We review methods and assess the policy influence of a series of publiclyfunded Cost of Illness studies, mostly published since 1990. Our analysis shows that headline cost estimates, including the influential paper by Collins and Lapsley (2008), depend on an incorrect procedure for incorporating...

This paper offers new insights into Beveridge curve analysis by modelling the vacancy-unemployment rate relationship within a Markov regime-switching environment in which the probability of curve-shifting is determined endogenously by shift factors. Shift factor candidates include structural...

In this paper we will use case studies to seek to understand the dynamic innovation processes at the level of the firm and to explain the apparent 'enigma' between New Zealand's recent innovation performance and economic growth. A text-mining tool, Leximancer, (version 4) was used to analyse the...

The paper discusses the construction of a new Consumer Price Index (CPI) for New Zealand, 1885-1913, based upon aggregation of data from the four largest provincial districts: Auckland, Canterbury, Otago and Wellington. Using these new provincial data, we explore the degree of market integration...