March 2024 Quarterly Economic Monitor (QEM) has been updated
Difficult time for regional economies
A deteriorating economic climate continues to make life difficult for regional economies, according to Infometrics’ latest monitoring of regional economies.
Infometrics’ March 2024 Quarterly Economic Monitor suggests that economic activity in the first three months of 2024 was 0.3%pa higher than at the same point in 2023, further slowing year-end growth down to just 0.2%pa – the slowest year-end growth since the original COVID-19 lockdown.
However, employment growth remains solid, with a 2.9%pa annual average increase in filled jobs recorded across the country. Jobs growth occurred across all regions, with the strongest gains in Marlborough, Auckland, and Otago over the March 2024 year. But the labour market is weakening, with the unemployment rate rising and Jobseeker Support recipients up 7.8%pa on average over the last year, indicating more people are looking for work even as job ads show considerable declines.
Data Updates
Traffic flows data remains unavailable. Traffic flows data remains patchy, with less than 80% of monitoring sites reporting data. We are actively working on an adjustment to this data to assess if we can bring it back soon.
Tourism expenditure data remains unavailable too, although MBIE has recently announced that an interim tourist electronic card transactions dataset (TECTs 2.0) will be available soon. This will be the fourth tourism spending dataset in as many years, and so once we have the data we’ll assess how it aligns with previous data, and how to use it.
As previously seen, a few of our new socioeconomic indicators have not yet been published for the March 2024 quarter, as this data is not published in as much of a timely manner as other datasets. Currently, we are awaiting data on public housing stocks, emergency housing grants, school attendance, first home buyer grants and gaming machine profits. We will update these indicators during the quarter as data becomes available and provide a notification to users when these are available.