Sustainable consumption growth: New Zealand’s surprising performance

We compile measures of ‘per capita Real Adjusted Net National Income’ (pcRANNI), being the income available for consumption by a country’s residents while maintaining the (broadly defined) capital stock intact, i.e. ‘sustainable consumption’. Changes in pcRANNI incorporate the impacts both of changes in technical efficiency (i.e. multi-factor productivity) and allocative efficiency where the latter reflects reallocation of resources in response to price signals. We find that New Zealand had approximately zero pcRANNI growth from 1970 to the early 1990s. Since then, New Zealand’s performance has been stronger than for most developed countries. We find considerable deviations between pcRANNI growth and per capita real GDP growth for some countries, highlighting the importance, especially for cross-country comparisons of aggregate economic performance, of focusing on income-based sustainable consumption measures.