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Purpose: Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) use networks to overcome knowledge deficiencies in pursuing innovation. However, balancing the cost and risk of growing networks, especially internationally, with potential gains in knowledge remains a critical challenge. Searching for innovation knowledge in international and domestic networks can be complementary when learning is compressed or as competing when the SMEs capacity to use the new knowledge is exceeded. This paper aims to investigate whether knowledge searches in domestic and international networks are complementary or conflicting in pursuit of innovation. Design/methodology/approach: This study is based on firm-level data set comprising 426 SMEs located in New Zealand, an advanced small and open economy. Using multi-level modelling, this study tests competing hypotheses, asking whether domestic and international network searches are complements or substitutes when seeking ambidexterity. Findings: The research finds that, in contrast to earlier research, which shows increasing network breadth drives innovation activity, SMEs benefit less from knowledge search across combined domestic and international networks for exploration innovation and ambidexterity. In contrast, exploitation shows no effect, suggesting that combined networks could support exploitation. Originality/value: This paper highlights how SMEs mitigate the influence resource constraints have on the partnerships they form and how this translates to ambidexterity. Specifically, recognising that an opportunistic approach to network development may impose future constraints on SME ambidexterity. From a management perspective, the paper recognises that balancing knowledge search across domestic and international networks can facilitate ambidexterity; however, to prevent spreading resources too thinly, this likely requires exit from early domestic innovation network partnerships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We identify monetary policy shocks in New Zealand as 1‐day changes in the whole yield curve around monetary policy announcements. The impacts of these shocks on inflation and output are estimated using functional local projections. We find that the effects of monetary policy shocks are standard in the short run but might be different in the long run. Monetary policy shocks in a small open economy have similar effects as in a large economy, except that unconventional monetary policy announcements have limited impact on long‐term interest rates. Accounting for forward guidance, used in New Zealand since 1997, is important. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing reliance on digital technologies for cross-border economic activity has sparked the quest for adequate rules. Preferential trade agreements have become the primary platform for digital trade rulemaking and the recently signed Free Trade Agreement (FTA) between the European Union (EU) and New Zealand is one of the latest additions to these far-reaching regulatory efforts. The EU–NZ FTA is a particularly instructive case study, as it brings together two important legal entrepreneurs in the area of digital trade law that, however, have different positions in the regulatory landscape and different domestic priorities. The article seeks to reveal the points of convergence and divergence between the two parties and also shows how these could be reconciled with the concluded EU–NZ deal. In the latter context, the article evaluates the normative value and the potential impact of the agreement as well as situates it in the broader and geopolitically complex landscape of digital trade rulemaking [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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There is increasing interest among policymakers in small open economies in the use of star-scientist recruitment policies to catalyse the development of local clusters in targeted research areas. We use Scopus to assemble a dataset on over 1.4 million publications and subsequent citations for Denmark, Ireland and New Zealand from 1990 to 2017. An event-study model is used to estimate the dynamic effects of a star arrival on quality-adjusted research output at both the department and matched individual incumbent levels. Star arrivals are associated with statistically significant increases in department output (excluding the output of the star) of between 12% and 25% after 4 years. At the incumbent level, star arrivals lead to an approximately 5% increase in individual output, with substantially larger increases for incumbents who co-author with the star. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2022 announcement of the European Union-New Zealand Free Trade Agreement was seminal for both sides. For New Zealand, the deal is projected to be worth up to an extra NZ$1.8 billion per annum by 2035. What is less evident is the motivation for securing the deal for Europe - New Zealand is only the EU's 50th most important trading partner and accounts for 0.2% of its total trade. This article outlines three major benefits for the EU. Firstly, it symbolises that the EU's neoliberal trading agenda is continuing in the face of perceived increased protectionism. Second, the deal includes a seminal clause of holding each partner to account in climate change responsibilities - a detail that should garner support from EU citizens. Finally, closer EU cooperation with New Zealand may add to the EU's legitimacy in the Indo-Pacific. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research investigates how small multinational enterprises (small MNEs) internationalize by opening branch offices or subsidiaries in foreign markets, managing their multiple embeddedness in their host and home locations, and their subsidiaries' dual embeddedness in external environments and within their organizations. We study four small multinational enterprises, two each from the small open economies of New Zealand and Finland, and we use literature from entrepreneurship and international business to derive a model of these multiple dimensions of embeddedness. The cases illustrate how firms can become more (or less) embedded in their locations through their physical presence, operations, key employees, and local hires while achieving internal organizational embeddedness through their corporate structure and social and technological bridging. Our research gives insight into how small MNEs may overcome their liabilities of smallness, foreignness, and outsidership by drawing on resources from home and host locations and sharing this throughout the organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the involvement New Zealand has had first with the Soviet Union from the middle to late 1970, and then with Russia and, in particular, the extensive and detailed work done between 2003 and 2012 focusing on a suggested free trade agreement and an interlinked agricultural co-operation agreement which have provided a strong governmental framework for the scientific, educational and business goals of both countries.

New Zealand's structural development has been dominated for the last generation by a strongly neoliberal, market-focused orientation. The country has signed several neoliberal free trade agreements, and for long periods largely abandoned active or strategic industry policy. It has seen the steady decline of manufacturing as a proportion of total production and of higher value manufacturing as a proportion of exports, and failed to significantly diversify its exports, retaining high dependence on a few primary commodity exports. Productivity performance has been notably poor. The Labour-led government elected in 2017 has demonstrated its willingness to at least partly break with neoliberal precepts in other policy areas; this commentary surveys its approach to date in industrial and trade policy reforms, and the role of unions in these developments. There are initial promising steps but the free trade agreements place significant restraints on what is possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New Zealand (NZ) was the first developed country to sign a free trade agreement with China. Afterwards, the NZ government crafted a narrative to encourage businesses to pursue opportunities there and in emerging Asia more generally to enact the enabling institutional change. Our study shows neoliberal free-trade rhetoric matched and thus likely confirmed businesses' opportunity perceptions but often mismatched their capabilities and thus interests. Businesses sampled predictably lacked scale, scope and other resources to realise the opportunities they perceived. We argue government communications tilted businesses towards the simplifying presumption that substantial opportunities lay within fairly easy grasp. As a result, over-enactment in entering the Chinese market followed. We identify the construct of 'peripheral evidence' as propping up presumptive tilt here and generally – irrelevant but widely observable facts or well-accepted predictions and opinion inappropriately shifted to centre-stage. Such centring discourages critical discourse and displaces properly central considerations – here the fundamental obstacles of size, scale and resources. Our study contributes to constructivist institutionalism by showing the mechanisms and tangible risks of uncritical pro-enactment discourse after formal trade liberalisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the signing of the New Zealand - China Free trade agreement in 2008, New Zealand's trade with the EU has seen less substantial growth. From being the second largest partner, the EU has become New Zealand's third largest trading partner, behind China and Australia. Moreover, the recent departure of the UK from the EU threatens to further downgrade the importance of the EU as New Zealand's trade partner and its relevance in terms of tourist origin to New Zealand. On the other hand, although still marginal, New Zealand's trade and tourist relations with the new EU member states from Central and Eastern Europe have seen a remarkable expansion. Focussing on the examination of current trends in the volume of trade and tourist exchange between New Zealand and this group of states, this paper assesses their importance for New Zealand - EU relations and prospects for their further expansion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper was originally presented as a keynote speech to the AIRAANZ 2020 Conference in Queenstown, New Zealand. By way of background, it was delivered in the context of New Zealand's continued pursuit of multilateral and bilateral trade and investment agreements. The most recent of these is the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), involving New Zealand and 10 other countries in the Asia Pacific region. Such agreements now impose or remove rules well beyond the traditional realm of trade. For example, they incorporate chapters on services, investment, competition, and intellectual property rights protection, and make deep inroads into local regulatory freedom regarding digital development and government procurement. For decades, the treatment of labour standards in the context of globalisation has been debated, both between and within the north and the south, and the labour movement and free trade adherents. What might be called the 'settled centre' of this discussion, has been the inclusion of provisions in these agreements purporting to recognise and encourage the application of selected labour standards. In this paper, the writer assesses the risks and opportunities of agreements like the CPTPPA for progressive labour law reform and argues for alternatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the effects of the 2008 New Zealand (NZ)–China free trade agreement (FTA) on exports from NZ to China, and real GDP per capita in NZ using the synthetic control method to estimate the counterfactuals. NZ exports to China were more than 200% higher in 2014 than what they would have had the FTA never been signed. NZ's food and live animals exports to China were more than 180% higher in 2014 than the counterfactual. Our counterfactuals indicate a small but negative effect of the FTA on NZ's real GDP per capita between 2009 and 2012. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main objective of this paper is to investigate whether economic uncertainty affects narrow money demand in New Zealand and whether the specified money-demand function remains stable over time. New Zealand adopted inflation-targeting in the early 1990s by discarding monetary-targeting or any other strategy of monetary policy for price stability on the grounds that instability in the narrow money-demand function might sever the relationship among money, output, prices, interest rates, and exchange rates, as the classical monetary theory suggests. This paper specifies an augmented money-demand function for an open economy that includes economic uncertainty and inflation volatility as two additional determinants of money demand. Quarterly data for New Zealand for the period 1995Q1–2017Q4 is used to determine whether these variables remain significant in an augmented money-demand function in this country. The empirical results, obtained by the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) approach to cointegration, suggest that there exists a cointegral relationship among variables in the specified model and that economic uncertainty negatively affects narrow money demand in New Zealand. Further, the empirical results, obtained by the non-linear ARDL (NARDL) approach, suggest that economic uncertainty affects narrow money demand asymmetrically. An increase in economic uncertainty lowers narrow money demand, while a decrease in economic uncertainty does not increase – and​ instead seems to decrease – narrow money demand. Unlike with economic uncertainty, an increase in inflation volatility, which represents inflation uncertainty, increases narrow money demand. Although it is not conclusively established in this paper, the effect of inflation uncertainty on narrow money-demand seems symmetric. The narrow money-demand function is found in this paper to have remained stable irrespective of whether the model is estimated by the ARDL or NARDL approach. This paper draws the conclusion that the abandonment of money in the formulation of monetary policy strategy, such as inflation-targeting in New Zealand, cannot be justified on the grounds of instability in the narrow money-demand function. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the entrepreneurship perspective and the network‐based view on internationalisation, this exploratory study contributes to our understanding of why some exporters succeed while others do not, through an empirical examination of export readiness factors. The paper provides an operationalisation of export readiness for small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs). Based on a sample of 96 New Zealand SMEs, we find that export readiness is a complex construct involving finance, trade and exchange, and marketing. The study provides evidence that internal export stimuli are important antecedents of export readiness, while factors traditionally assumed to be critical to export success, such as importing and pre‐export domestic expansion, may not be prerequisites to being export‐ready. Finally, the study examines the link between export readiness and subsequent, initial export performance and finds a strong, positive relationship. Our study contributes to the export literature by providing a deeper and more integrated understanding of the antecedents of export readiness in a small, open economy, and its implications for subsequent export performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the New Zealand and China upgraded the free trade agreement, with a package of agreements to further streamline trade and investment and to take account of recent developments, particularly in the areas of services trade, e-commerce and a growing interest in making sure trade and the environment work better together; and mentions that Chinese investors have found in New Zealand profitable business opportunities which are contributing to economic growth and development.

This paper examines how innovative small firms achieve innovation within lean environments. Writers taking a resource-based view (RBV) approach to innovation by small firms in lean environments have argued that they are resource-constrained through shortages of skilled labour, finance and social networks. This paper builds on the RBV approach by adopting a dynamic capabilities (DCs) lens to investigate how innovative small firms adopt and acquire DCs to achieve innovation in a lean environment in a small country with an open economy that is distant from major markets. We argue that entrepreneurs will engage in pragmatic solutions to overcome resource constraints. We provide qualitative evidence from a programme of 30 interviews and find that innovative small firms achieve innovation through ingenuity and patience. Our entrepreneurs use methods such as bricolage and bootstrapping and make cooperative arrangements with early adopters to maximise use of their limited resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is free trade dead? In January 2017, President Trump withdrew the United States from the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade agreement (TPP). This paper examines some of the anthropological implications of what emerged out of the "death" of the TPP. It analyses what this reveals about the changing contours of the neoliberal state, business-government relations and the subjectivity of corporate leaders. More broadly, it seeks to explain the tenacity of free trade and what is at stake in pursuing free trade agreements such as the TPP. Drawing on fieldwork among state and business elites in New Zealand, the paper suggests that rather than rethink its policy direction, the state deployed discursive strategies and elicited the help of business to reposition free trade as the solution, not the cause that eventually "killed" the TPP. Thus, rather than undermine neoliberalism, the demise of the TPP opened the possibility of its advancement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Voter turnout in New Zealand has declined markedly since 1984. This article offers a critical survey of policy and political science literature that addresses voter turnout decline in New Zealand, comparing it with international trends in this field. We provide a profile of the non-voter in New Zealand and identify and critique six common explanations for non-voting: psychological factors; institutional variables; electoral context variables; macro-economic trends; mobilisation variables; and a generational shift away from 'habitual voting'. Each of these trends is, in itself, limited in its capacity to satisfactorily explain non-voting. We therefore offer a synthesis of these trends to provide a fuller account of voter turnout decline in New Zealand. We argue that the literature would be usefully extended by more systemic analysis of the issue that considers political-economic restrictions to parliamentary democracy. We extend this critique by briefly noting the negative effects that trade and capital market liberalisation has had on government responsiveness to citizens. Consideration of such issues raises questions about the efficacy of parliamentary democracy in contemporary capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides an overview of New Zealand's export market. It mentions about the views of Catherine Beard, executive director of ExportNZ on free trade agreements (FTAs) of the country for reducing trade barriers; competitiveness faced by exporters due to increasing costs in New Zealand; and use of strong marketing tools for building the same.

The article focuses on New Zealand's foreign relationship with China. Topics discussed include meeting of New Zealand politician Jacinda Ardern with China President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang; negotiations on the free trade agreement upgrade while reiterating joint commitment to the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership; and bid of China to join the World Trade Organization (WTO).

The article offers information on the importance of Asia–Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) to New Zealand. Topics discussed include vision of free and open trade and investment; relations of New Zealand for foreign direct investment, exports to APEC economies, meeting economic and regulatory agenda; and economic integration and relations.

By imposing symmetry and proportionality conditions and using the asymptotic theory of panel-VAR models, this study examines the behavior of real exchange rates and productivity bias hypothesis for New Zealand vis-a-vis her major trading partners and the proposed free trade area. The evidence clearly rejects the strong version of the PPP hypothesis but the weak version of the PPP hypothesis receives some support. The findings also indicate that productivity differentials among countries are one of the major sources that contribute to the deviation of the PPP-based exchange rate from the equilibrium rate. Policy implications for the proposed free trade agreement are offered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The chapter will document the Canadian reaction, as reflected in the demand of New Zealand, that Canada fundamentally alters its dairy supply management system in order to participate in the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations. The Canadian government has resolutely refused to do so, supported wholeheartedly by dairy farmers throughout the country. This is in part because of the effect such an action would have on rural spaces and the debilitating result it would have on Canadian dairy production. As well, the chapter will address the issue of the cost of dairy products in New Zealand as compared with Canada. Part of this analysis will focus on the role of supermarkets in determining the price structure of milk in both Canada and New Zealand. Finally, the chapter will offer an examination of the New Zealand system as represented by Fonterra and the Canadian system as epitomized by dairy supply management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why does Canada lack the closeness of economic ties with China enjoyed by other developed Commonwealth countries, such as New Zealand? While these countries take similar positions toward China with regard to human rights and security-related matters, they differ markedly in terms of trade relations--New Zealand inked a free trade deal with Beijing in 2008, while such an agreement between Canada and China has remained out of reach. This article probes the source of this divergence. The answer, it is argued, lies in the sociotropic effects of political opposition groups on both the left and the right in Canada, and the absence of parallel conditions in New Zealand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]