Economic measures show region growing well
Posted on Tuesday 16 April 2019
Recently released annual GDP figures (at March 2018) show Nelson Tasman is doing well when compared to New Zealand as a whole, with positives in wage growth, shrinking unemployment and the proportion of higher-skilled jobs remaining fairly high.
The biggest contributor to job growth and to GDP growth in the last 10 years has been Professional Scientific and Technical Services.
Tourism continues to be a major contributor to the economy and the retail sector receives 44% of tourism spend.
However, whilst the growth in earnings has been faster than New Zealand's totals, Nelson Tasman still sits at 14% below the national average, catching up by only 1% in the last five years. Productivity fell slightly and this when combined with the tight supply of affordable homes and our shrinking working-age population, results in the issue of attracting skilled labour to the region.
This remains a key challenge for the region, underscoring the need for regional development to increase the uptake of innovation and technology across all industries and attract talent and investment to the region.
The Nelson Regional Development Agency (NRDA) commission regular reports from Infometrics to track a range of economic measures across the region and to get a better understanding of the local economy. The reports allow the NRDA to target efforts and see results - for example, destination marketing activity wants to see higher-value visitors who spend more while they are in the region, and the figures indicate this is happening.
The reports have also been procured to provide easy-to-access tools around this type of data to assist businesses with their investment decision-making.
