Economy the focus at Fuji Xerox opening

NZ incredibly good at supplying low-value products, says economist

Not many new-office opening functions pack in as much as Fuji Xerox’s launch of its new Wellington base last week.

The function included addresses on what’s wrong with the economy and how we might put it right, from NZ Stock Exchange CEO Mark Weldon and Professor Sir Paul Callaghan, head of Victoria University’s McDiarmid Institute.

Callaghan emphasises that “the real engine of an economy is innovation.
“New Zealand is incredibly good at what we do,” he says, “but what we do is supply very low-value products to the rest of the world.”

Our highest-value industries like dairy are polluting and difficult to scale up to match other countries’ productivity. Tourism earns $77,000 per job and the dairy industry about $400,000 per job, but Samsung earns $1.3m per job from electronics, he says.

Until we move more effort into very high-value innovative products like those of the ICT industry, we will not achieve our goals of matching the economic performance of Australia or other leading OECD nations, Callaghan says.

Read more at Computerworld.