Measuring real success

I realised I'd had enough of the Olympics for another four years when I found myself staring at a semi-final of the women's Handball tournament between, I think, Norway and Georgia. Now come the analysis and post mortems, including the recent discovery that Bronze medallists ('Wow, I got an Olympic medal') are generally happier than those who win Silver ('If only I'd gone just a little harder ...').

New Zealand has had a successful fortnight, with a haul of three Gold, one Silver and five Bronze (that's why we needed that earlier analysis), placing it twenty-fifth in the overall Medal rankings.

We're sure to see commentary around New Zealand's traditional area of strength - medals per head of population. Here we are near the top again this year, with just over 2 medals per million of population, pretty much in line with Australia. On this measure, we're six times as successful as the USA (three million people per medal) or Britain (1.2 million per medal), but we all trail Jamaica, who dazzled on the track with eleven medals in total (six of them Gold), from a population of fewer than three million (remember 'Cool Runnings' - the movie about the Jamaican bob-sleigh team?). If you want more, see this forecasting model produced by Professor Andrew Bernard in the United States and this clever graphical analysis by the New York Times, showing relative performance at each Olympic Games since 1896.

Enough jingoism for one blog post! What I really want to write about is a more meaningful, and sobering, measure of a country's success - New Zealand's ranking in GDP per head of population. Here we have little to be proud of over the last forty years. From being one of the wealthiest countries in the 1960s, we slipped to 22nd out of 30 OECD countries by 2005, sitting between South Korea and Spain, with about 85% of the OECD average Real GDP per head. In 1970, we were up at about 115% of the OECD average.

The good news is that we stopped sliding in the early 1990s. The bad news is that, despite stated political ambitions to return to the top half of the OECD ladder, and enjoying New Zealand's best terms of trade for some decades, we've made no real progress in the last few years.

Looking ahead, I think we face two dark clouds, both related to our remoteness: the growing issue of 'food miles' presents yet another non-tariff barrier to our food exports. Regardless of the science, and the proven fact that total carbon emitted in sending our produce to Europe is less than that of European produce (where stock are generally housed under cover during winter), what really matters is what the supermarket shopper believes. We need to get our message across.

The second point is similar: whether we can remain a destination of choice for the world's tourists, if they get more concerned about the carbon footprint of long distance travel.

As a resource-rich country, we're blessed with some of the world's best conditions for producing protein, we have plenty of fresh water (usually) and a broad range of options for our energy needs. Until recently, we've been sheltered from the adverse trends by high prices for our commodities and a strong and growing global economy. The latter is fading fast, while the former may continue for a few years. But we need to face the reality that one day we won't be the world's cheapest food producer: South America and Eastern Europe are not standing still.

This is a challenge for governance at all levels: for Boards, it's important that we all play our part in thinking how we can genuinely transform our businesses, to get ouselves back onto a faster-growth path. We have the raw materials, we have the brains and the education; we need to commit to investing in a country that wants to grow the pie faster, rather than simply distributing what we have differently.

Next time, I'll look at one person's recipe (non-party political) for restoring New Zealand to the levels of wealth we could enjoy - with all the other benefits that flow in health, welfare and life expectancy.