The Hawke’s Bay economy is coming off the back of five good years of economic growth, which has averaged around 4.9% p.a. in real terms.

High growth rates within the economy have also helped employment to grow and the unemployment rate to decline.

The encouraging thing is that while some of the drop in the numbers of unemployed can be attributed to transfers to the sickness benefit, the participation rate within the economy has increased to just over 68% of the working age population.

This means that more people have been drawn back into the workforce than in previous years and that people maybe re-entering the workforce, or first-time employees have been able to find work.

This has changed little over the past five years, with agriculture and food processing cementing their importance to the regional economy in terms of share of GDP.



A national perspective
While Hawke’s Bay has been doing well in its own terms, it is also important to get a feel for the regional position to find where Hawke’s Bay sits in a national and international context.

Strengths
The key regional strengths include:

Climate
The region is blessed with a temperate, Mediterranean style climate due in large part to the shelter provided by the ranges in the West. This gives the region long hot summers and short, relatively mild winters, factors which yield great growing conditions for agriculture and weather conducive to an outdoors lifestyle.

Hawke’s Bay is relatively well positioned against other regions to offer probably the best lifestyle climate in New Zealand.

Hawke’s Bay has less extremes of weather than the other lifestyle areas of Nelson-Marlborough and Bay of Plenty. While Tauranga and Nelson may have more sunshine hours than Napier, they either have more rainfall and wet days or frost days respectively.

Agriculture and Food Processing
These two sectors continue to dominate the Hawke’s Bay economy, as shown in the table from the previous section. In fact, when compared with New Zealand GDP on a sector by sector basis, they represent the only serious comparative industrial advantage that Hawke’s Bay possesses.

Hawke’s Bay as a whole comprised approximately 3.1% of national GDP, with only agriculture and food processing significantly over that mark.

Good Bones
Hawke’s Bay has “good bones” with which to work and upon which can be built a compelling story for migration and investment. This is one of the findings from the Windshift market research project undertaken in conjunction with the strategy work.

To access more detailed regional economic statistics click here....