As The Treasury observed in its Briefing for the incoming Government in 1999, "Draw a circle with a radius of 2,200 kilometres centred on Wellington and you capture within it 3.8 million New Zealanders and rather a lot of seagulls. Draw a similar circle centred on Helsinki and you capture within it a population of over 300 million, from 5 39 countries."
And for Helsinki, The Treasury could equally well have said Dublin or Singapore. Second, our natural resource endowment makes us extremely efficient at producing some things that we are effectively banned from selling to many of the consumers of the world.