The New Zealand Institute
| Grade | NZ Rank | Trend | Latest Value | 2015 Target | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| C | Equal | C. Effort graded B- | New Zealand's overall performance still average |
New Zealand is a country with high potential. Material wealth, a productive and beautiful environment, cultural richness and many world-class institutions make it a great place to live. New Zealand’s appeal is based on the whole package, not a single attribute.
Success depends on the package, so a suite of measures is needed to track how well the country is performing. Schools use report cards to identify opportunities for students to improve, and businesses use balanced scorecards to monitor performance. For a country, a set of societal performance measures provides an indication of whether outcomes are improving or not, and helps identify areas where more effort is required.
Looking at all 16 NZahead measures to judge performance is complex, so it is helpful to have a summary measure that forms an overall conclusion. There are several ways a summary measure could be developed. The one chosen for NZahead is to make a qualitative assessment based on judgement. Others will make different judgements, which is understandable because people are likely to have differing views of what is important.
In forming an overall assessment, there are many considerations. How the country is performing now is important so GDP per capita, life expectancy and carbon emissions matter. The assets available for the future are important, so wealth and environmental quality matter too. Not everyone is doing well, so inequality and outcomes for disadvantaged groups matter, not just the averages.
It is also important to take account of how New Zealand compares with other countries. New Zealand cannot escape competing with other countries to retain citizens, attract migrants and investment. Being a high quality country and improving outcomes is not enough if other countries are improving faster. The comparison used here is with OECD countries; the developed and wealthy countries that are most like New Zealand.
The overall assessment answers an important question; should New Zealanders be happy that the country is performing as they want it to, or do we need better strategies or increased effort?
For 12 of the 16 measures New Zealand’s performance is ranked relative to other countries.
In this update, new data was available for all measures. New policy, research, or further information that has become available has been provided in the text for all measures.
There is an improving trend for five of the measures, and deterioration for four. New Zealand gets three B grades reflecting valuable strengths in education and in agricultural land per capita and life expectancy. But there are also still seven D grades and not one A grade.
Three patterns identified with the first report card released in March 2010 persist. First, despite improvements on average in some social measures, New Zealand’s disadvantaged are not doing well relative to disadvantaged people in other OECD countries. Second, relatively poor performance in innovation, labour productivity, GDP per capita and household wealth indicate that across the board economic performance must be improved. Third, New Zealand has important environmental strengths but environmental assets are being eroded, as they are for the world as a whole.
The past year has been a challenging one for Government. The Christchurch earthquakes, global and local economic weakness, and deterioration in the fiscal position have limited Government’s options. It is easy to be critical but the constraints our leaders operate with should also be considered. Despite the constraints we should also expect Government to be articulating the long term priorities for action that will lead to materially improved outcomes.
In terms of achievement, New Zealand is not currently a star performer. At some point in the past, New Zealand has performed better on most of these measures. Compared to the peer group of OECD countries, New Zealand is too often behind the average. There are two areas of strength but lots of C and D grades. Since the March 2010 and September 2010 releases, there is no strong evidence for overall improvement, or for deterioration. Therefore the overall grade for achievement remains a C.
With widespread recognition of the issues New Zealand faces, and action in place to improve outcomes on almost all the measures, there is definitely evidence of effort. However, the efforts are not all well-directed and some do not comply with best practice for performance management. There are not clear and widely understood strategies for success. Progress toward goals is not always monitored and reported, and efforts in one area are not always well coordinated with other efforts. On balance, New Zealanders care and are taking action. Overall an unchanged grade of B- for effort.
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