Clearly it is more difficult to know whether these are working if there are doubts about the level of GDP per capita, and whether our measure is truly comparable with that of other countries, including that of our large trans-Tasman neighbour.
New Zealanders rightly worry about the extent to which New Zealand incomes have drifted below the world’s highest in the last 40 years, but how large is that drift, and how have the gaps changed in more recent times? For helping answer those questions, good and economically comparable data are vital. This paper does not answer the question “are we closing the trans-Tasman gap”?