Knowledge Economist

Finance Minister and Deputy PM, Dr. Michael Cullen, articulates the edge phenomenon in a lengthy interview with the  Economist. “[There is] a very significant solid eclectic range of niche manufacturing and service industries which have developed in NZ, and continue to develop at a strong pace. These are industries which really build on flipping over NZ’s disadvantage of scale and distance, and concentrate on areas where distance isn’t important, and where small size is actually an advantage, like the ability to engage in short-run production, for example, the ability to be highly innovative and flexible, so you’re not locked into just punching out huge numbers of electronic boxes one after the other. We can never compete with that, but we increasingly do elsewhere. People are often quite surprised to find that what they’re using, what they’re doing, what they’re seeing, is actually NZ product.”