Brian Easton: How has the New Zealand economy been doing?

Stagnation and Contraction

In this column I use the less familiar measure of GDP per capita instead of the GDP measure favoured by the commentariat. I became familiar with it when I began doing international comparisons because of the population differences between countries, while I depended upon the measure while working on New Zealand’s economic history because of significant population change. The measure is also better for thinking about distributional issues.

Michael Reddell: Once were a trading nation

I’ve used here before the snippet from older books that in the decades before the Second World War it was generally accepted that New Zealand had the highest value of foreign trade per capita of any country.  Estimates of historical GDP per capita suggest we also had among the very highest levels of real GDP per capita.

That was then. Yesterday I noticed this tweet from a Herald journalist. I presume the chart was taken from The Treasury’s Briefing to the Incoming Minister.