KEY POINTS:
It's always nice, isn't it, when you can feel public-spirited and good about doing what you want to do anyway.
Right now shopping falls into that category.
Demand, you might say, is in short supply.
Consumer spending has been going backwards all year. Each quarter less stuff has been going out shopkeepers' doors than the quarter before.
Household borrowing is growing at the weakest rate since comparable records began, and about half the rate recorded at the trough of the early 1990s recession.
And that is not just a reflection of low turnover and falling prices in the housing market. Consumer credit growth is feeble. Credit card debt has increased in only two of the past six months.
From a longer-term perspective this may be no bad thing.
At the height of the debt-propelled spending binge, households were spending about $1.14 for every $1 of income, which was clearly not sustainable.
One of the uncertainties economic forecasters have to grapple with now is what people will do with the extra discretionary income coming their way as a result of falling mortgage rates, tax cuts and lower petrol prices.
The business sentiment surveys are sounding an ominous note about prospects for the labour market. As employment growth dries up, unemployment rises and job insecurity spreads, people can be expected to reduce debt and build up some precautionary savings.
How strong that effect is, compared with the desire to satisfy pent-up demand from the days when petrol and food and interest costs were sky-high, remains to be seen.
This leads to a wide spread of views among forecasters.
The New Zealand Institute of Economic Research thinks we are just about at the trough of the cycle in private consumption and is picking a consumer-led recovery next year, albeit a slow uphill-trudge sort of recovery.
That is based on its expectation that net immigration will rise and wage growth, a cyclical laggard, will remain quite high, while consumers benefit from lower oil and food prices, tax cuts and lower interest rates.
Deustche Bank, by contrast, expects no growth at all in private consumption next year and a pretty feeble 0.8 per cent increase in 2010.
"Historically, weaker house prices have been associated with subdued consumer spending," its chief economist, Darren Gibbs, says. "We see no reason why this will not be the case this time."
When house prices were rising at double-digit rates and homeowners got a letter from Quotable Value every year telling them they were tens of thousands of dollars richer than a year earlier, they felt confident about going out and spending at least a few cents in the dollar of that increased wealth.
But the "wealth effect" has now gone into reverse.
Gibbs also expects the unemployment rate will climb from 4.2 per cent now to 7 per cent over the next year.
While private consumption is the biggest source of demand in the economy (representing 62 per cent of expenditure GDP in June), the Government is also a major buyer of goods and services, accounting for about 18 per cent of GDP. (That does not include transfer payments like New Zealand Superannuation and welfare benefits).
Both the previous and incoming Governments could see the merit of a good old-fashioned Keynesian fiscal stimulus in these grim times. After all, Crown debt is at levels which are low by historical standards and enviable by international standards.
Finance Minister Bill English said last week that the fiscal impulse - or extra boost to demand - would be around 4 per cent of GDP over two years, broadly comparable with what other countries were doing.
Most of that (2.8 per cent) relates to the current fiscal year to June 2009 and reflects increased spending in Michael Cullen's last Budget and the October tax cuts. Most of the rest would be the tax cuts National has promised for April next year.
So it would seem unwise to expect a lot of additional stimulus to be announced in the economic package due before Christmas.
Turning to investment, the outlook is cheerless.
Residential construction is in a slump. Consents for new dwellings issued in October, seasonally adjusted, were down 22 per cent on a year earlier and the lowest on record in a statistics series which stretches back to 1982.
You might think it would be a good time to build more state houses. Instead the policy is to increase spending on upgrading the existing stock. This has the merit, from the Government's point of view, of providing work for tradesmen currently surplus to the private sector's requirement, without increasing the state's role as a landlord.
They probably would not have to look very hard to find schools which could do with having some building work done.
The other big component of investment spending is business capital expenditure.
But businesses' revenues are under pressure, profit margins are being squeezed, banks are getting a bit parsimonious with credit and a lower dollar makes imported capital goods much more expensive. Little wonder, then, that investment intentions in the business sentiment surveys have a distinctly droopy look to them.
So what does that leave? Net exports? Oh dear.
Even a few months ago it was plausible to expect, or at least hope, for an export-led recovery next year.
Instead we face the onset of a global recession, with the United States, Europe and Japan all going backwards at the same time, for the first time since the early 1980s.
It is notable that the gloomiest forecasts about the New Zealand outlook are coming from institutions based in the Northern Hemisphere like Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs and the OECD.
Some factors are positive for the export sector, notably a sharp fall in the exchange rate and a return to normal growing conditions in most of the country.
But exporters still need buyers and those positive factors need to be set against the impact on global demand of massive loss of wealth from falling housing and equity markets, and the loss of lending power in the global banking system.
Both of those effects are running into trillions of dollars, and the impacts on international trade can really only be guessed at.
If net exports improve it is more likely to be because the demand for imports has ebbed.
Given the parlous state of the country's external accounts in recent years that is another of the adjustments that needed to happen.
But it won't leave anyone feeling any better.
