New Zealand’s infrastructure challenge: Quantifying the gap and path to close it

New Zealand’s infrastructure challenge is too large to fix by simply investing more. At present, we spend roughly one out of every twenty dollars we earn as a country on public investment, but this research finds that we would need to lift that to nearly one of every ten dollars to fully address our infrastructure challenges through new investment. This rate of investment would need to be sustained over a 30-year period.

This research undertakes a high-level analysis of New Zealand’s current and future infrastructure requirements, covering issues like addressing existing infrastructure deficits, providing for future population and economic growth, maintaining and renewing infrastructure, and cost pressures due to limited delivery capability.

This research was undertaken by Sense Partners. Sense Partners’ analysis highlights the scale of the infrastructure challenges facing us, and the need to look for a range of solutions to our challenges, including making better use of the infrastructure we have, making better decisions about how to invest, increasing sector capacity to deliver, and increasing infrastructure funding and financing.