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The paper examines the value-generating strategies used in some of New Zealand's primary activities in a rapidly changing trading context in which the countries of East Asia increasingly figure. These strategies range from scaling up volume, with a consequent conspicuous impact on rural landscapes, to innovative value-enhancing relationships linking producers, processors and consumers in processes which value landscapes for the contribution they make to provenance stories. Our argument is that higher-value strategies are necessarily more intensely collaborative and involve a pursuit of engaged relationships, especially between onshore producers and manufacturers and consumers at a distance. We term this collaborative form of strategising as 'the relationships economy'. We illustrate our argument using two case studies, dairying and merino. While there are great differences in scale between them, and dairying focuses significantly on volume-generating capacity, there are players in dairying who are adopting higher-value relationships-based approaches similar to those developed in the merino industry. The common thread connecting the case studies is that of intentional enactment, which echoes earlier periods in New Zealand's trading history when considerable work was undertaken by industry participants to create new markets for primary products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the effects of international trade and investment on output and tests the Granger-causal nexus among trade, investment and economic growth in New Zealand for the period 1954-2007. The results provide consistent support for the long-run effects of trade and investment on output. The optimal single-equation and the vector autoregression-based system estimates of the model consistently suggest positive and significant long-run effects of exports and investment on output. The effects of imports on output are positive across all and statistically significant across most estimators. The Johansen test for cointegration suggests the presence of one equilibrium relationship among the model variables. The JMN test for cointegration with structural breaks provides mixed support, while the end-of-sample cointegration breakdown tests lend dominant support for cointegration among the model variables. The positive and significant long-run effects of exports and investment on output underline the need for the promotion of exports and increase in investment to foster higher levels of output and economic growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]