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Weekly commentary

Wellington by air - 2024

US President Ronald Reagan is famous for repeatedly using the phrase “trust, but verify”, underscoring the importance of testing assumptions to confirm that claims are true. It’s a phrase that economists also keep in mind when dealing with a vast array of different datasets. Read


Herd of cow on green grass field during daytime

New Zealand’s provincial economies contribute greatly to the overall economy, providing dairy, meat, and horticultural products to the nation and overseas export markets. Read


Ohura main street

The challenges of structural ageing and population decline are set to shine through again with subnational population estimates due next month. This article explores previous periods of population decline – looking at how effective migration is at holding back decline, how we should plan for decline, and what has happened to areas which have experienced population decline in our history. Read


Light coming through the clouds over New Zealand

Weaker economic activity and falling employment are hitting regional economies, with the economic crunch deepening across the country, according to Infometrics’ latest monitoring of regional economies. Read


NZ Hydro Lakes

The New Zealand energy market has been in the spotlight recently, as a shortfall of energy, from both gas and electricity, has sent energy prices soaring. It’s become such an issue that production has started to be curtailed for some operators, either because they cannot procure energy supplies, or it has become economically unviable to pay such high prices. Read


The government has relaxed tax rules for property investors, and will do so again in April next year, and it has also reduced the bright-line test. But since March, seasonally adjusted house sales volumes have slipped to a 15-month low. Our analysis looks at whether the government’s changes are like... Read


SS Rangitoto arrives in New Zealand

The United Nations released its biannual World Population Prospects earlier this month, a global population projection to the year 2100. In this article, we explore the latest projections for the world’s population, and what the trends might mean for New Zealand’s migration. Read


Person holding pencil near laptop computer

Two key themes about the economy came through in NZIER’s latest Quarterly Survey of Business Opinion (QSBO), published last week. Firstly, the labour market continues to soften across the board, with a range of labour market indicators at their weakest since around 2009. Secondly, there has been a f... Read


Estimating underlying demand for housing is an inexact science, because people’s preferences about the number of people per household, or the proportion of vacant dwellings, can never be observed. At a nationwide level, our longstanding model of underlying demand for new housing is premised on the t... Read


Preschool children in a playground

Migration is a persistently hot topic and tends to dominate discussion around trends in population growth, taking the limelight away from the other components of population change. However, New Zealand’s fertility rate recently reached a record low, so this article explores trends in fertility and what’s driving it. Read