New Zealand households and the 2008/09 recession

This paper quantifies how the welfare of different types of household changed between 2006/07 and 2009/10; a period which included the 2008/09 recession. We use three measures of household welfare: income, expenditure and the EV metric. Using household-level data from the Household Economic Survey (HES), we allocate households into groups, first based on one dimension (e.g. age) and then clusters. The clusters, groups of households that are similar on a number of dimensions, lead to inferences beyond what is available from our one-dimensional groups. Households in low-income groups, with children and/or who rent were particularly impacted by the recession in terms of welfare losses owing to price changes. However, we find that those in low-income groups had strong increases in expenditure; furthermore, the welfare gains from this increased expenditure more than offset the welfare losses from the price changes.