Kia ora koutou,
We would like to thank all the businesses taking part in the development of the new Tara-ā-Umanga Business Expectations Survey as we build a representative sample survey of New Zealand businesses.
Following a successful development phase, we plan to commence ongoing quarterly publication in mid-May 2025 (for the June quarter) in advance of the 28 May Monetary Policy Statement, in line with the timing of our other expectation surveys.
This new survey includes several hundred businesses from different sectors around the country, from small to large firms. It is separate from the existing Survey of Expectations including expert forecasters and economists, and industry leaders (Table M14, 1987 - onwards), which will continue.
Business Expectations Survey, final testing:
We completed our development of Tara-ā-Umanga Business Expectations Survey with a fourth pilot survey in January 2025. The testing phase has allowed us to test the survey methodology over multiple waves, build the sample size over time, and creates a one-year span of quarterly data. A public consultation on the survey was undertaken during March 2024.
Tara-ā-Umanga Business Expectations Survey: Concluding development update outlines our lessons learnt from the latest testing activities and resulting design decisions.
- The achieved sample size has built to 389 responding businesses in pilot 4 (383 in pilot 3, 251 in pilot 2 and 68 in pilot 1).
- We maintained consistent design decisions and survey weighting methods from pilot 3. Additional data analysis, using pilot 4 data, provides confidence that these choices are suitable for a high-quality ongoing survey.
While the pilot survey results are experimental, the new series are already demonstrating the value of a large representative sample survey. For example, by facilitating estimates of expectations broken down by business size and industry. It should be noted that while this survey represents a significant uplift in our expectations data, more observations are needed to enable us to estimate the relationship between these data and ultimate inflation outcomes.
Background information
Inflation expectations are important because households and businesses reflect their expectations in their price- and wage-setting decisions. Improving the quality of our expectation surveys is part of the wider response to our 2022 review of how we formulate and implement our monetary policy. In this review, we identified several areas where better data could support high quality monetary policy decision-making.
For further information please see Tara-ā-Umanga Business Expectations Survey: Survey design and development
For the latest Monetary Policy Statement see Monetary Policy Statement February 2025
Director of Data, Statistics and Analytics