Economic geography, globalisation and New Zealand’s productivity paradox

Abstract

This paper examines New Zealand’s poor productivity performance from the reform period onwards, from the perspective of economic geography. Rather than employing institutional or free-market versus interventionist arguments to explain New Zealand’s low productivity, as is usually the case, the argument developed here is that the debate should be considered from a very different viewpoint. If we adopt an economic geography perspective, there is nothing really paradoxical about New Zealand’s productivity performance. As such, New Zealand’s productivity performance is rather more of a conundrum, a riddle, with a fairly straightforward solution. © 2009 New Zealand Association of Economists Incorporated.