Historical Trade Stats for New Zealand - BLUE Books

Yes this is a Blue Book - in fact the Blue Book for New Zealand for the year 1842.   Archives New Zealand have digitised the 23 books of national statistics for the period 1840-1855.   They are known as blue books because of the colour of their covers (most are blue!) and they contain statistical information including trade.  They take a while to download but be patient - they contain some fascinating handwritten information.

Photo: Archives New Zealand | Te Rua Mahara o te Kawanatanga

New New Zealand datasets website

The New Zealand Department of Internal Affairs has just produced and gone live with their data.govt.nz website which is an index to publicly accessible government datasets.   These are not necessarily new datasets, but this website brings them all together.

A search on exports retrieves four results, but a search on trade is more productive and produces 13 hits.  
This is a good way to ensure that you or your international trade colleagues have picked up all the relevant and available information.

Deals Open Important Markets - How Important?

A column by Jon Morgan in the Dominion Post October 21, 2009 reports that the farmer-owned meat cooperative Silver Fern Farms has negotiated a deal with French grocery cooperative Intermarche. Silver Fern Farms will supply chilled lamb under their own brand to Intermarche which has 1500 stores in France.


Intermarche also has 500 stores in Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Poland and Romania. This is where the opening of important markets comes in. I wondered what the size of New Zealand’s current export trade to those five countries is currently, and so set myself a reference question to find out.  Here are my results:

In the June year 2007-2008 New Zealand exported to:

Belgium    Goods worth NZ$587,414,000 of which sheep meat (HS code 0204) was 28.04%

Spain       Goods worth NZ$299,865,000 of which sheep meat was 9.2%

Portugal   Goods worth NZ$ 42,201,618 of which sheep meat was 44.9%

Poland     Goods worth NZ$ 20,245,916 of which sheep meat was 1.02%

Romania  Goods worth NZ$ 4,756,880 . No sheep meat has been exported to Romania in the period 2000-2009.

So certainly it seems that with the exception of Portugal where exports of sheep meat made up over 40% of New Zealand’s trade, then the Silver Fern Farms initiative could indeed open up markets for our products in the other countries and especially Romania.

Photo: from Flickr Creative Commons-licensed content for noncommercial use requiring attribution http://www.flickr.com/photos/mollivan_jon/67858560/

Sources:


Statistics New Zealand (2008) Global New Zealand international trade, investment and travel profile. pp.41 and 47

Figures for Portugal, Poland and Romania from Statistics New Zealand. Infoshare. Retrieved 21 October 2009.

Got the numbers...

Photo: Marie-Louise Siddle

Reflections at Chaffers Bay, Wellington Harbour

July 25, 2009

It goes without saying that statistics are an invaluable source for the information professional. They are also the most frustrating area to deal with, which is probably why many people working in international trade are happy to take any sets of figures they can find. Three points illustrate some of the difficulties faced.
1. I was checking all my links yesterday on the New Zealand School of Export website and discovered that the freely available Trade and Banking statistics that I had had for Russia no longer were available. In fact the Russian government doesn’t appear to provide any free statistical service. There are statistics available in other compilations and I will be using those.
2. Statistics New Zealand has just given its website a makeover and as a result has caused mayhem among New Zealand libraries with links to Statistics New Zealand pages. Even the Library at Statistics New Zealand has over 900 links to fix! Our website had only one – a measure perhaps of the fact that we haven’t come to terms with all the information that is offered there.
3. Today I had an information enquiry about exports from the Manawatu-Wanganui region. Locally we don’t have a port from which goods are exported so that has proved difficult. A report from BERL economics entitled: Economic Profile and Projections for the wider Manawatu Region:

http://www.visionmanawatu.org.nz/downloads/BERL%20projections%20to%202026.pdf

has digested a lot of statistics and provides some help. Statistics New Zealand may have some way of tracking these figures but neither Table Builder or Infoshare on the revamped website have helped.

All in a day for the information trade professional I guess!