Our Data Partners And Public Data Sources
The Knowledge Exchange Hub is proud to partner with a range of key New Zealand organisations from a variety of industry sectors. Our partners have been extremely generous both with their time and their valued data sources. Our key partners include Worldline, PortConnect and KiwiRail from whom data is fed into the AI & machine learning models on a daily basis and have made GDPLive possible.
GDPLive also incorporates publicly available data from Ministry of Business, Innovation & Employment, New Zealand Immigration, NZ Transport Agency, Reserve Bank of NZ and Stats NZ.
Further details on the nature of the data sources and the features extracted from them can be found in the Technical Report.
Worldline is a global leader in secure payments and trusted transactions. Worldline's New Zealand data encompasses 70% of all payment transactions made from 150K EFTPOS terminals around the country. This coverage comprehensively captures daily consumer spending trends, a key component of GDP.
PortConnect is New Zealand's first comprehensive online cargo management system. PortConnect provides tracks all shipping container movements from Ports of Auckland and Port of Tauranga, including their Auckland satellite ports at Wiri and Metroport. This data source represents another key component of GDP, namely, the import/export figures. The data from PortConnect serve as daily input to the predictive agorithms.
KiwiRail is New Zealand’s largest rail transport operator in New Zealand, incorporating business units of KiwiRail Freight, The Great Journeys of New Zealand and Interislander. Currently all shipping data through KiwiRail Freight is incorporated into the AI & machine learning models on a daily basis.
Trade Me is the leading online marketplace and classified advertising platform in New Zealand. Members of Trade Me can buy, sell, get a job, meet a partner, find a home, sort insurance, and a heap of other things that help Kiwis get on with life. Established by Sam Morgan in 1999, Trade Me has been owned by Fairfax, was a listed company, and was acquired by Apax Partners in 2019.
Steel & Tube is one of New Zealand's leading providers of steel solutions, distributing and processing a range of products from nuts and bolts, to roofing and reinforcing through to the largest structural steel products. Steel and Tube Holdings Ltd provides GDPLive with daily customer transaction data. Demand for steel products is a leading indicator of construction activity in New Zealand, with the construction industry representing 6.41 percent of GDP in New Zealand in 2019. As such, this data represents another important component of economic activity and GDP.
There is a tendency for economic growth to be positively affected with the rate of increase in the labour force size as well as ultimately its productivity. Quarterly figures on the labour market are integrated into the models. Current unemployment rate as well as seasonally adjusted changes to it, and changes in the size of the labour force can be visualised here.
Population growth, especially through net migration in the NZ context as well as short-term visitors are thought to be one of the strongest contributors to the national GDP. Our servers acquire data on immigration on a quarterly basis with data becoming available one to two months following the end of each quarter.
It is widely accepted that moderate and stable inflation rates promote economic growth. To that end quarterly CPI data are incorporated into the models.
Recent research indicates that increases in household debt in relation to a country's GDP is a predictor of a weakening economy. Indebtedness levels and debt servicability, as well as quarterly changes in the servicability levels are integrated into our models.
Waka Kotahi NZ Transport Agency tracks traffic movements along major highways around the country. This data is aggregated and fed into the models on a monthly basis. Previous research has demonstrated the utility of using both heavy and light traffic movements as a proxy of economic activity. 
