New Zealand’s population and development path: unravelling the ‘when’ ‘how’ and ‘why’

Abstract

New Zealand’s demographic regime, moderate to high population growth for most of the last 170+ years, has shaped ‘nation building’, especially self-identity (Pool 2016). Increasing population numbers, the quantum of demography, is the value ‘writ large’ in our consciousness, as an immigrant country with one of the highest rates of natural increase (births minus deaths) among western developed countries (WDCs). Yet, the spectre of slower or negative demographic rates has now appeared for some regions, and even nationally (Jackson and Cameron 2017), invoked popularly by the application to various districts of the inexact and pejorative term ‘zombie towns’.