Business confidence announcements attract widespread attention, yet relatively little is known about the series itself. What, for example, does an improvement or deterioration in business confidence mean? We consider this question using a panel of firm-level responses to a business opinion...

The New Zealand Biotechnology sector is worthy of study for several reasons. While there is a large and growing international literature on economic aspects of biotechnology innovation these studies concentrate on the United States and Europe. The New Zealand biotechnology sector may be expected...

The ANZ Bank publishes a monthly count of the number of job advertisements appearing in New Zealand newspapers and, more recently, internet sites. It is New Zealand’s de facto vacancy or help-wanted series. Apart from its role in economic commentaries, there is very little published research...

WNew Zealand’s population is ageing rapidly and alongside this the labour force is also ageing. This paper presents a descriptive analysis of the labour force and employment trends among older New Zealanders (that is, those aged 55 and over). Specifically, the paper focuses on labour force...

Understanding the financial literacy of young people is an essential prerequisite for developing effective education programmes designed to improve young people’s understanding of personal finance. In this paper, we present results from a survey of high school students which included a...

In 2003, New Zealand significantly reorganised high school education by moving to a standards-based assessment approach. This paper investigates whether the economics standards are associated with economic understanding using 2008-2011 data from students at the University of Waikato. We find...

New Zealand is acknowledged widely as the first country to implement a formal monetary policy agreement specifying an explicit inflation target. This agreement, signed in March 1990 between the Minister of Finance and the Governor of the Bank, was implemented under Section 9 of the Reserve Bank...

Data on the flow of workers moving between employment, unemployment and non-participation provide some of the most interesting and useful insights into labour market outcomes. These insights include information on the number and probability of workers moving between labour market states from,...