New Zealand economy gets a C, must try harder

New Zealand is a C-grade student when it comes to social, economic and environmental measures, according to a New Zealand Institute report card.

The country was not a star performer and was often behind the average when compared with a peer group of OECD countries.

"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," the report said.

"However, the efforts are not all well-directed and some fail to comply with best practice for performance management."

Targets were not defined, progress toward goals not always monitored and efforts in one arena were not well co-ordinated with those in another.

"On balance, New Zealanders care and are taking action, even if they are not confident that they will be successful," it said.

The country scored a B- for effort.

New data was available for seven of the 16 social, economic and environmental measures, with life expectancy regraded from B to C.

It was six months since the first release of the report card and institute director Rick Boven said the indicators could not be expected to change dramatically in that amount of time.

"Government has placed an emphasis on improving economic performance and there is much worthwhile discussion, planning and change, but our performance measures report results and a lot remains to be done," Boven said.

The Government had defined a set of six policy drivers where effort was being focused, known as the Economic Growth Agenda.

Many relatively small-scale economic changes had been made in the areas of focus defined by the Economic Growth Agenda and the initiatives were well chosen, the report said.

An aspirational goal of matching Australian GDP per capita by 2025 had stimulated useful debate and analysis, although there was a widely held view that numerous sensible incremental economic improvements were not likely to be enough to achieve the goal.

New Zealand did not perform well on household wealth, the report said, ranking last overall in comparison with eight countries for which the institute sourced information.

Efforts to improve social wellbeing and environment outcomes appeared to have lower priority and so rapid improvement in these measures could not be expected, it said.

"A more balanced approach will be required in the medium term or New Zealand will fall further behind on important social and environment measures," Boven said.

"Strong social and environment performance is needed for long-term economic success."