<\/p>\n
\nThe prosperity tracker measures elements like work-life balance.
\nPhoto: 123RF\n<\/p>\n
A new measure produced by Massey University is designed to track New Zealand’s prosperity beyond just the headline numbers.<\/p>\n
The tracker – Prosperity Live – has been developed by Professor Christoph Schumacher, and includes measures of education, employment, health, housing, income, safety, social wellbeing and work-life balance.<\/p>\n
On Tuesday, the tracker was 0.2 percent down on the day before. On an annual basis, employment, health and income were down, and the overall tracker was down 0.1 percent.<\/p>\n
Education, social wellbeing and work-life balance had not moved, and housing and safety were up.<\/p>\n
Schumacher said the housing measure, which showed a 7.1 percent improvement, looked at price-to-income data.<\/p>\n
“The reason for the upward trend is the decrease in house prices and a lower OCR, which makes housing more affordable overall.”<\/p>\n
He said safety was measured by the national homicide rate and perceived safety in communities based on data from the police, Stats NZ, wellbeing surveys and Google Trends.<\/p>\n
“While overall prosperity is calculated daily – with daily data that serve as proxies and a machine-learning algorithm has learned how to link changes in our daily data to the overall change in prosperity – the individual dimensions are measured only every six months.<\/p>\n
“Dimensions with zero percent change simply have not changed in the past six month. This is not too surprising with dimensions that are inherently subjective.<\/p>\n
“Perceived work-life balance or wellbeing might not change much within a short time frame.”<\/p>\n
He said the index would pick up dramatic events, such as the drop during the global financial crisis (GFC), the Christchurch earthquake and Covid.<\/p>\n
“The sharp increase in 2020 was driven by an increase in social connectedness, work-life-balance and feeling of safety. This picks up the change when people worked from home, connected more with others and felt safe in NZ.<\/p>\n
“The drop that followed was when life went back to ‘normal’. The 2023 increase was driven by a reasonably big increase in safety.<\/p>\n
“With global tension increasing substantially in 2023, maybe Kiwis felt very safe.”<\/p>\n
Schumacher expected the index to drop from here.<\/p>\n
“The economy contracted in Q2 and unemployment is increasing, which should negatively impact on overall prosperity.<\/p>\n
“Gross Domestic Product is important, but prosperity is about so much more than just economic growth. Prosperity Live allows us to track whether New Zealand is flourishing across multiple dimensions – it’s a living, breathing measure of how we’re doing as a nation.”<\/p>\n
[ https:\/\/rnz.us6.list-manage.com\/subscribe?u=211a938dcf3e634ba2427dde9&id=b4c9a30ed6 Sign up for Money with Susan Edmunds], a weekly newsletter covering all the things that affect how we make, spend and invest money.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The prosperity tracker measures elements like work-life balance. Photo: 123RF A new measure produced by Massey University is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":40085,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[48,138,47,219,111,43,139,69,49,46,44,45],"class_list":["post-40084","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-audio","tag-business","tag-current-affairs","tag-economy","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-podcasts","tag-public-radio","tag-radio-new-zealand","tag-rnz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40084","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40084"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40084\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/40085"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40084"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40084"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40084"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}