2024 has been a challenging year for the economy, and although Infometrics has been sailing the same choppy waters of the accountant-sea as our clients, we’d like to focus on the positives as we pause for the summer break and reflect on the past 12 months.

Our economists have been as industrious as ever in fulfilling our mission statement of “Economics Put Simply”. In headline numbers:

• Over 1,000 mentions in print, radio and TV media
• Over 100 visits to clients around the country – we don’t just view the regional economy from a telescope in our Wellington tower!
• Over 100 new articles about the economy on our website (21 with subscriber-only insights)
• 12 Economic Webinars and 36 Economic Talks
• A net increase of 72,000 lines of code in our website and data processing pipeline

All of that code is the result of our economists, data analysts and developers working hard to bring even more value to our subscription dashboards, on top of the regular quarterly and annual data updates.

With the release of (most of) the 2023 Census data by Stats NZ, we created a new Census module within the Regional Economic Profile, replacing the standalone Community Profile. We’re incredibly proud of the new features we’ve been able to add, and really appreciate all of the positive feedback we’ve had from our clients. The Census offers large range of indicators about people, families and households right down to small neighbourhoods - it can be tricky navigating all of the options but we feel we have found a good balance. We were also quite pleased with ourselves for making the 2023 data available only a day after Stats NZ made their multi-GB tables available for download!

More broadly, we’ve expanded the value of the Regional Economic Profile with comprehensive data download functionality for clients and added a range of new indicators, with the two main highlights:

• A new Environment section with indicators for air and water quality, and land cover
• Combining the Māori and Pacific Peoples sections into an easier to use Ethnicity section, adding data on Asian ethnicity for existing indicators, and new indicators for Māori enterprises

The Quarterly Economic Monitor has also had significant growth this year, with the addition of many socio-economic indicators. In fact, we added so many indicators we needed to redesign the navigation, overview and report structures to accommodate them!

Our Events Calculator has had more than a makeover, being completely rebuilt from scratch. The refreshed tool has a number of new features and usability enhancements.

Finally, alongside a long list of smaller additions and tweaks, we've made an effort to improve the in-site communication about changes, to both let you know when they happen and why. We've also tried to make it easier to give us feedback. If you have anything you would like to let us know - whether to note what is working well or to suggest how we could improve our services - please hit that "Feedback" button and send them through. A lot of our updates are either inspired by, or improved through, feedback from our clients.

We can't let the year go with noting that the company has now been "putting economics simply" for over 40 years. One of the biggest highlights of the year for us was a celebration of the company’s 40th anniversary at Parliament in August, attended by current and past staff, many of our clients, journalists, and politicians, including the Minister of Finance.

We're all looking forward to a relaxing summer break, but also excited about what's in store for next year. We have lots in store on our development roadmap, with plans to add more data and more features. Watch this space!

Wishing all our clients and their families a happy and relaxing Festive Season!