Stats NZ updated their annual national accounts for the year ending March 2024 today. These updates bring their GDP stats into line with the Annual Enterprise Survey and other benchmark data sources. The annual measures shake out as much of the data vagaries that plague the quarterly measures, and reset them to as accurate as possible.
They are also the annual updates SNZ does to its capital stock account, which feeds into my modelling of the economy. I’ve been hanging out for this update for a bit because, from a previous blog, the New Zealand economy was in the worse shape it had been since the Mother of All Budgets in 1990, in terms of unemployment and large production output gap. Until today, that modeling had been working over the year ending March 2023 stats, which meant the two most crucial years – 2024 and 2025 – were modelled years in my data, and subject to error on my part.
Now, with the year ending March 2024, I’ve got accurate industry net productive capital stock measures to base a production function upon, and a global estimate for 2025, which I can use to better estimate the potential capital stock industry decomposition for 2025.
Here’s the updated and previous pictures:
The previous picture was:
2025 was worse than I predicted.
Much worse…
Who’s doing it tough?
Information, media and telecommunications, retail/wholesale, transport and, weirdly enough, banks experienced way less demand than they should have given their capital stock and employee numbers. Expect some more lay-off in those areas.
On the flipside, construction is starting to recover – its still got the largest output gap, but is less in 2025 than in 2024. And Forestry and Mining should be sweating a little bit less in 2025 than they did in 2024.