Much of the value New Zealanders get from natural assets is intangible, making it difficult to measure. Currently, there are a variety of techniques used to measure the value of natural assets, adding to the cost and uncertainty of values obtained. A standardised technique would make economic...

A new report from the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research (NZIER) highlights the unprecedented fiscal challenges that New Zealand politicians will face in coming decades. NZIER recommends that tough decisions around taxes and government spending need to be taken now, and stuck to, in...

Over the next year another 50,000 people will become unemployed. The number of unemployed will surpass that of the last recession of 1997-98. To address the unemployment challenge New Zealand needs to supplement existing job search assistance with investment in training and business capital to...

Performance indices are used worldwide as indicators of activity in key sectors to assist analysts and decision-makers. An advantage of these indices is that, by pooling information from the series that make up the indices, idiosyncratic variation is smoothed out, and a stable and potentially...

Most explanations of the current economic and financial crisis focus on its financial causes. Often missing in these explanations is a discussion of how the seeds of the crisis were sown by economic policies in major countries that fostered the growth of global imbalances during the 2000s....

This paper uses NZIER’s dynamic Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model of the New Zealand economy to conduct a preliminary investigation into how an increase in New Zealand’s national savings would affect New Zealand’s GDP and living standards. We do not specify how this increase might...

New Zealand’s average income, defined as GDP per capita, is now three quarters that of Australia and even lower than in Australia’s poorest state, Tasmania. Over the last seven years, New Zealand has grown slightly faster than Australia,but at these rates, it would still take 140 years to...

New Zealand is ageing. The number of old people will increase three-fold and will soon comprise a very large segment of society. Ageing will shrink the labour supply relative to the size of the population and the existing supply of capital. That has implications for wages and interest rates....