This report provides a technical description of the Regional Land Transport Demand Model (RLTDM), which is a hybrid approach to forecasting transport demand across New Zealand regions. The model’s outputs include deterministic and stochastic forecasts of a wide range of economic and transport series. We re-coded the model in Stata and Mata.

Accreditation is a crucial part of New Zealand’s quality infrastructure. The accreditation services provided by International Accreditation New Zealand (IANZ) increase the confidence of New Zealand and overseas consumers to purchase products that are produced or tested by accredited organisations. In this report we provide an independent assessment of the economic impact of IANZ.

Accreditation services create an 8 percent price premium for exporters through reduced transaction costs, which leads to improved productivity and profitability. We used our extensive Computational General Equilibrium (CGE) model of the New Zealand economy and identified that IANZ’s accreditation services lead to:

• a total increase in exports by $3.4b, consisting of an $8.2b increase in exports of industries using accreditation offset by a decrease in exports of industries not using accreditation,
• 1.6 per cent higher real wages, which increases consumption by $3.3b,
• $2.4 billion increase in annual GDP of New Zealand.

Aotearoa New Zealand suffers from an infrastructure deficit. Without the key infrastructure needed now for our economy to thrive, we deprive future generations from significant economic prosperity. While transformational infrastructure projects necessitate time to be developed into sound technical solutions to our needs, many New Zealand projects are further delayed by policy decision and financing constraints.
In this novel application of the infrastructure Wider Economic Benefits approach, we quantify the cost to society of these further delays for the first time, by using the example of the Waikato Expressway. We used our subregional CGE model to estimate the downstream benefits of the Expressway. At a high-level, results of our analysis quantify the annual benefits of having the Waikato Expressway in the economy. Without the expressway in function as early as possible, $334 million of economic benefits were forgone each year.

Cite this article

Principal Economics. (2022). Great decisions are timely: Benefits from more efficient
infrastructure investment decision-making. Report to Infrastructure New Zealand.

Avoid costly delays in decision-making. For deep uncertainty, plan ahead, start small, and keep monitoring. Climate is beginning to exacerbate extreme “one-in-100-year” events. Our knowledge of the likelihood of these large-impact events happening in shorter intervals is limited. Adaptive Decision-Making can help to minimise the cost (from delays) to the economy through increasing flexibility at the planning phase. Our earlier work estimated the annual cost of delay to be equal to 18 per cent of the capital cost of projects.

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Principal Economics. (2023). Climate change adaptation and investment decision making. Waka Kotahi NZ Transport Agency.

Dunedin City Council appointed Principal Economics to provide a comprehensive assessment of the sufficiency in development capacity of business land within Dunedin to fulfils requirements of the the National Policy Statement on Urban Development (NPS-UD 2020), including an investigation of:

• the locational requirements of business including shape, size, access, reverse sensitivities, and other market factors;
• the external pressures businesses are facing (such as the uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the impact of coastal hazards);
• impacts on business activities from reverse sensitivities; Locational accessibility to labour markets and customers; Changes in demand from population growth; changes in residential distribution;
• infrastructure requirements for different business sectors.

In our assessment of demand and sufficiency we identified existing businesses across New Zealand and their locational attributes including but not limited to land size, shape, access, reverse sensitivities and other market-based factors. We use industries’ revealed preferences to assess the features of land that they have determined as being suitable. This was then matched with the supply of business land in Dunedin City after applying a range of spatial analysis techniques.