Jason Timmins

Movements Into and Out of Child Poverty in New Zealand: Results from the Linked Income Supplement

This paper considers the dynamics of child income poverty in New Zealand. Annual movements into and out of poverty by children’s households in New Zealand over the 1997/98, 1998/99, and 1999/2000 periods are analysed. The annual Income Supplement to the Household Labour Force Survey allows tracking of dwellings and people in two consecutive June quarterly weeks, and thus allows observation of changes in equivalised household disposable income over a June year. This project is the first to use the Linked Income Survey for analysis of income dynamics and is part of the Ministry of Social Policy’s ongoing research on family dynamics.New Zealand adult and child poverty transitions are compared. Child poverty transitions in New Zealand are compared and contrasted to those of five other countries—Britain, Germany, Hungary, Russia and Spain—where a similar current income measure of poverty is available. The frequency of poverty “trigger events” in New Zealand and their impact on the chances of children exiting and entering poverty are compared to similar data for Britain and West Germany.

Moving to Jobs

This paper examines whether New Zealand residents move from low-growth to high-growth regions, using New Zealand census data from the past three inter-censal periods (covering 1986-2001). We focus on the relationship between employment growth and migration flows to gauge the strength of the relationship and the stability of the relationship over the business cycle. We find that people move to areas of high employment growth, but that the probability of leaving a region is less strongly related to that regions fortunes. We also find that migration flows to the metropolitan regions of Auckland, Canterbury and Wellington include a higher proportion of international immigrants compared with the rest of New Zealand.

Is Infrastructure Productive? Evaluating the Effects of Specific Infrastructure Projects on Firm Productivity within New Zealand

The paper investigates the feasibility of using a variant of the spatial equilibrium model to estimate the productivity effects of a specific infrastructure project in New Zealand. Policy makers are interested in the marginal effects of infrastructure investment on productivity and an evaluation of such effects would provide a useful check on the appropriateness and adequacy of current decision rules and institutions. To date, there appear to be no examples of using a spatial equilibrium model to estimate the productivity effects of a specific infrastructure project. However, the analysis in this paper suggests that such an approach is feasible. There is a range of data and estimation issues that needs to be addressed in the use of a spatial equilibrium model for this purpose, but we find that a reasonably useful range of data is available in New Zealand. The next step in determining feasibility is to select a particular infrastructure project, and to develop an empirical model based on available data.

An Analysis of New Zealand’S Business Demography Database

Given that a future linked employer-employee database may use Business Demography data as a backbone, what are the basic qualities of this dataset? What are the observed patterns in job creation and destruction in New Zealand? What are the general patterns in business growth in New Zealand? This analysis uses employer-based data from Statistics New Zealand’s Business Demography Statistics (BDS) database for the period 1994-2001.

An Analysis of Teenage Employment by Firms, 1999-2007

Changes to youth minimum wage legislation in New Zealand together with steady increases in minimum wages since 2001 have contributed to substantial increases in the minimum wages for teenage workers, and significant increases in the number of teen workers earning at or near minimum wages. With these changes as a backdrop, this paper uses data from Statistics New Zealand’s Linked Employer-Employee Database (LEED) to document the pattern of firm-level teenage employment over the period 2000-2007, and analyse the responses of firms to the increasing relative wages of teen workers.