Productivity by the numbers: The New Zealand experience

This Research Paper provides a comprehensive assessment of New Zealand’s productivity performance for the whole economy and for individual industries. It describes New Zealand’s productivity performance through time and in comparison to other OECD countries. The focus is on illustrating productivity trends.

The paper’s overall finding of a generally poor productivity performance – both at the economy-wide and industry levels – underscores the need for New Zealand’s policy environment to be strongly supportive of productivity growth and for firms to have a clear focus on improving productivity.

Many initiatives to improve productivity are also industry specific, requiring a detailed understanding of productivity performance at this level. The paper provides that perspective and is intended to be a helpful resource for policy-makers and industry leaders. It also provides an important foundation for deeper debate on New Zealand’s generally poor productivity performance.