Period-specific information: Year ended March 2020

Period-specific information National accounts input-output tables: Year ended March 2020 are consistent with National accounts (industry production and investment): Year ended March 2020. The current tables use the Annual enterprise survey: 2020 financial year as a main data source, but use many other data sources to estimate product data. There are nine input-output tables in this release. See User guide for National accounts input-output tables: Year ended March 2020 for the explanatory notes on how the tables can be used. Impact of COVID-19 pandemic GDP for the year ended March 2020 included effects from the COVID-19 pandemic. While New Zealand only went into alert level 4 lockdown at the end of the period – on 25 March 2020 – COVID-19 had earlier impacts on economic activity, such as earlier travel restrictions at the border and falling terms of trade. See Gross domestic product: March 2020 quarter for more information. The mitigation on data issues encountered, treatment of government funding support, and other improvements introduced to national accounts over the period are discussed in detail in the 2021 national accounts improvements preview. Stats NZ is aware that these impacts may affect some users’ confidence in using the year ended March 2020 tables and has balanced this against the value of using the most recently available balanced year. The main consideration is that input-output tables’ chief purpose is to show the structural relationships in the New Zealand economy over an entire year, therefore, the impacts of the March quarter on the 2020 figures are muted. On a practical basis, we have very limited commodity data available on a quarterly basis outside of imports and exports. Such structural changes were managed in the annual reconciliation of flow of goods and services through the supply-use balancing framework. Changes in inventories Changes in production processes have resulted in changes to the allocation of inventories to commodities. NA06CC 784.00 Audio-visual and related services and 923.10 Information technology design and development related services are now recognised as commodities where inventories can be built up, reflecting “work-in-progress” produced by a firm over multiple periods before being delivered to a client. This reflects the treatment of work-in-progress as per paragraph 10.134 of the System of National Accounts 2008. CDC survey Due to resource constraints, the CDC survey has been on hold since 2016. This has limited the extent to which we can reflect structural changes between the March 2020 and 2013 tables. Commodity updates have been made using sources such as AES returns, Household Economic Survey, imports and exports data, and specific industry sources such as the ICT survey. en-NZ