Articles

Diesel has emerged as the critical pressure point in New Zealand’s current fuel shock, posing a far greater risk to economic activity than other refined products due to its dominant role across transport, agriculture, and heavy industry.

New Zealand is facing a growing economic risk as tightening diesel supply intersects with sharply rising fuel prices, creating a dual shock that is beginning to ripple across industries.

A stream of end-of-year data coming through shows, on the surface, a generally more upbeat view of the economy.

Employment has fallen over the last year, as businesses across New Zealand have seen lower sales and falling business activity, and moved to right-size their workforces for the work on offer. But the fall in employment hasn’t been spread evenly across all industries, with some seeing a steeper drop in activity and a steeper drop in jobs.

New Zealand’s energy markets have been in focus in recent months, after low gas production and low hydro lake levels combined to force prices higher. The recent threatening of an energy crisis seems to have been avoided – for now – with prices normalising somewhat.

This analysis brings together publicly available ad spending data to help inform conversations about ad spending on media, and more broadly, media funding, into the future. Infometrics has compiled a long historical time series of ad spending by type of media, to better inform debate.

A constrained global supply of diesel has led to a substantial increase in prices over the last few months, both for importers, and at the pump. Higher diesel costs threaten to intensify inflationary pressures, with geopolitical concerns adding further upside risk. In this article, we outline the issues facing the current diesel market, and the outlook over the remainder of 2023 and into 2024.

For almost forty years, Infometrics has provided predictions across a range of building indicators to both government and private business clients. With activity across the broader economy under pressure, and the construction industry at a turning point, the need for reliable estimates of both the duration and magnitude of the emerging downturn is especially critical.

Understanding economic diversity in an economy is about analysing the diversity of ways that an economy creates economic output. A common way to do this is to look at the relative size of the industries that make up an economy. Here, we outline a framework for doing so.

New Zealand’s greenhouse gas reduction targets are a critical part of moving towards a more resilient and sustainable model of production. An important, and underdiscussed part of this conversation, is the notion of emissions intensity: the level of emissions in relation to GDP.