7 / 12  BIS central bankers' speeches  With the New Zealand economy becoming generally more integrated with the global economy, we are likely to see less variability in measures of economic slack and also less variability in labour costs, consistent with a flattening of the Philips Curve. New Zealand has always been a price taker for goods traded in the international markets.
It now appears that, with labour mobility and globalisation effects, we are increasingly a price taker in “non-traded” goods and services (figure 10). For example, suppliers of education and tourism services are now operating in increasingly competitive international markets. They are facing international competition for their services and also for their labour inputs. Both sectors have been growing as a share of GDP.