Our distance from world markets and a resource endowment which favours the production of goods which face major obstacles in international markets are facts of life. To make matters worse, we have compounded matters by creating some of our own obstacles to economic growth.
For example, as a country we squandered a large amount of capital investing in projects of very low or negative value in the late seventies and early eighties, most as a result of strong government encouragement – the Clyde dam, NZ Steel, and the synthetic petrol plant to name just three. 4  Scobie and Mawson, op. cit.