Articles

Stats NZ released their latest subnational population estimates, providing us with an annual glimpse into how New Zealand’s population is growing around the country. In this article, we highlight the overall trends of the 2024 estimates and pull out interesting results from specific cities or districts.

New Zealand has experienced an immigration surge since we reopened our border to international migrants in August 2022. Here we look at how this surge has changed the make-up of workforces across New Zealand’s territorial authorities (TAs).

The United Nations released its biannual World Population Prospects earlier this month, a global population projection to the year 2100. In this article, we explore the latest projections for the world’s population, and what the trends might mean for New Zealand’s migration.

Although a lot of the discussion around migration over the last year has focused on the record high inflows into New Zealand, the outflow of people from New Zealand has now also lifted to a record high, 11% above the previous maximum in 2011/12.

The unprecedented migration surge since mid-2022 has seen a net 110,000 working-age people added to the population during the last 12 months. This outcome is a flow-on effect from the labour market disruption caused by the borders being shut during COVID-19. Businesses have needed to...

Migration is a lot like rain. When we receive a lot of migration (or rain), having prepared and invested for it, and directed it into the most needed areas, it can make us all better off. Conversely, receiving more migration (or rain) than we are ready for, in the wrong places, can make things worse. Knowing it could rain but never buying a raincoat seems to be an unfortunately good analogy for how we currently seem to approach migration.

At its most basic, our modelling and forecasting of residential consent numbers has two key influences: interest rates and population growth. Within the components of population growth, net migration is the biggest swing variable, while births and deaths tend to change much more slowly.

Migration has become a hot topic over the last year, with a record high net migration gain. This large inflow of people into New Zealand has seen the population increase by 145,000 people once births and deaths are accounted for – slightly more than adding an additional Dunedin over the last year.

The New Zealand economy has entered the new year with questions about whether the worst of the post-Covid hangover is behind us, or whether there’s more of a slowdown to come in 2024. We have collected our thoughts on three issues that will play a key role in determining New Zealand’s economic performance this year.

Data for October could show migration edging up to another record high, surpassing September’s result of nearly 119,000 people net coming into the country over the last year. But with this flood of arrivals adding to demand pressures across the economy, provincial areas could bear the brunt of the policy response.