What impact will the emission budget have on your company’s performance? How will it affect your supply chain, operational costs, and market opportunities? Are your ESG measures aligned with the broader economic and regulatory changes shaping New Zealand’s transition to a low-emission economy?
Our latest report investigated the economic, environmental and social impacts of the Government’s emission budget (available here). The developed database of various sectors’ significant policies and investments provides a comprehensive and robust framework for various decision-making tools, particularly useful for ESG planning, and analysing the complex interactions within New Zealand’s economy, including inter-firm trade, consumer spending, investment decisions, and labour market dynamics.

The outputs of this established CGE model are readily available for integration into Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) planning. For instance, understanding the economic repercussions of emission reduction policies can guide a company in aligning its environmental strategies with national objectives, ensuring compliance and identifying opportunities for sustainable practices. These outputs enable businesses to:

• Align with National Objectives: Understand and anticipate the economic repercussions of policies like emission budgets, ensuring alignment with regulatory requirements while identifying opportunities for sustainable practices.

• Enhance Social Responsibility: Assess the broader social implications of economic changes, such as sectoral employment shifts and income distribution, to inform socially responsible initiatives.

• Drive Strategic ESG Decisions: Leverage detailed economic insights to develop strategies that are economically viable, environmentally sustainable, and socially equitable.

CGE models can shed light on the social implications of economic policies, such as employment shifts across sectors or changes in income distribution. This information is crucial for companies aiming to enhance their social responsibility initiatives, as it allows them to anticipate and mitigate potential adverse effects on communities and employees.

Our report examines the expected costs and benefits of the reforms. Changes are currently articulated mainly as broad principles and high-level descriptions of the institutional arrangements. Much of the detail is still to be developed, and the benefits of the reforms will depend on the physical outcomes that result, eg how much will pollutant emissions reduce, housing affordability improve, or Māori engagement increase?

The report focuses on understanding the nature of costs and benefits under the different domains and how these are expected to change at the margin, eg whether increased environmental quality will yield positive net benefits. We provide an indication of the potential for benefits in different domains. The realisation of these potential benefits is dependent on the final design and implementation of the reforms.

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.