Professor Robert MacCulloch: Labour turned NZ into the Worst Performing Economy in Asia-Pacific

It's Official: Labour turned NZ into the Worst Performing Economy in Asia-Pacific. Does that mean the Covid Royal Commission will investigate itself?

Our former Finance Minister, Grant Robertson, was hired by Otago University to help sort out its finances. Good luck to them. Let's see how he did sorting out NZ's finances. The IMF released its April 2024 World Economic Update yesterday. Our Main Stream Media - Stuff, NZ Herald, and the bankrupting Newshub - won't dare blare the headline:

Labour Turned NZ into one of the World's Worst Performing Economies

Where's the evidence? Well, first, take a look at how the other economies in our Asia-Pacific region of the world are doing. In 2023, whilst Robertson was Finance Minister, NZ had the worst GDP growth rate and worst trade balance by a long way (at -6.9% of GDP). Lucky the folks at the IMF didn't measure GDP per capita, since it fell by more than -2% in 2023 due to record immigration, which makes us the only Asia-Pacific nation to be in a deep contraction and only country to be in a double-dip recession.


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Another of the IMF's tables, which focuses on 41 Advanced Countries in the World shows that from 2005 to 2016, before Ardern, Hipkins & Robertson came to power, the average growth rate across those countries was 1.5%. NZ came in way above, at 2%. Our institutions stood up magnificently throughout the Global Finance Crisis era. Meanwhile, in the last quarter of 2017, as Labour were finishing up their time in power, the Advanced Country average was 1.6% whereas NZ was in recession at -0.3% (the 7th worst performing country). If these number are adjusted to account for our rapidly expanding population, we'd come in close to bottom, together with Israel at -3.8% due to its war. Its a shame that the Ardern-Roberston-Hipkins war on Covid turned into a war against our economy.

We're still waiting for a retraction of the statement from Prof. Michael Baker & his coauthor Prof. Tony Blakely, the Commissioner of NZ's Royal Commission into Lessons Learned from Covid, that "One of the perceived barriers to applying a vigorous response, such as elimination, to the pandemic is the belief that this might sacrifice the economy & ultimately result in more hardship & negative health effects. Our preliminary analysis suggests the opposite is true" which they published in British Medical Journal. Boy, did they get that wrong.

Sources:
https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO/Issues/2024/04/16/world-economic-outlook-april-2024
https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4907
https://www.covid19lessons.royalcommission.nz/about-us/meet-the-commissioners/

Professor Robert MacCulloch holds the Matthew S. Abel Chair of Macroeconomics at Auckland University. He has previously worked at the Reserve Bank, Oxford University, and the London School of Economics. He runs the blog Down to Earth Kiwi from where this article was sourced.