An orderly transition to lower emission intensity in a small open economy requires a careful balance of exposing the economy to emissions costs but at a manageable level and pace. What is considered manageable for the economy is subject to debate, as is the size and distribution of impacts on...

A firm’s business strategy does not exist in a vacuum; it requires employees to implement it. However, firms often say that they have difficulties hiring certain types of employees. Through interviews with firms and analysis of the 2008 New Zealand Business Operations Survey, this research...

This paper examines the determinants of firms’ skill shortages, using a specially-designed survey, the Business Strategy and Skills (BSS) module of the Business Operations Survey. We combine the BSS module with additional data on firms in the Statistics New Zealand’s prototype Longitudinal...

This paper summarises the results from two projects that investigated skills in New Zealand businesses. The first – The Impact of Skills on New Zealand Firms – combined three different surveys to investigate the availability of skills and skilled workers both within the firm and their...

Place matters in innovation. New ideas – and the capability to translate them into innovative goods, services, processes or markets – rely on the sharing of knowledge and resources by a diverse range of players, including firms, suppliers, employees, universities and government research...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of skill shortages on the supply of training within New Zealand firms. The study uses a specially designed survey, the Business Strategy and Skills (BSS) module of the Business Operations Survey 2008 (BOS 2008). The paper evaluates the impact of...

How is New Zealand best able to maximise the potential of its enterprise population? The simple answer is that it has to ensure that the „rules of the game‟ (incentives and signals) are as good as they can be. Nonetheless, there still may be instances of market failure, suggesting grounds...

There is a rapidly developing empirical literature on the effects of agglomeration on economic activity. This paper surveys recent studies that provide econometric estimates of effects. Doubling economic density increases labour productivity by three or more per cent. Beneath this general...