Drawing upon its experience with financial inclusion, the RBI crafted a pandemic response that reached out in the form of unconventional measures to those afflicted sections of 2  society, keeping finance flowing, and financial institutions and markets functional, especially when personal incomes were lost and the future was highly uncertain.
The proportion of the population participating in the labour force reached record levels in 2015 and labour force growth has averaged about 2 percent per year since 2012, well above expectation (Figure 1). The Reserve Bank has undertaken considerable research over the past year on the impact of migration, labour market slack, and wage bargaining by New Zealand businesses.