cbud
Jon Sullivan@cbuddenhagen Yikes! On #RNZ this morning there’s some complications with interpreting the NZ government job losses. Their original estimate of 9,520 jobs lost was criticised by the government. RNZ recalculated to exclude vacant jobs that were not refilled, and it’s now 4,157 jobs lost from the “core public service” plus about 4,000 from “Crown entities” like Health NZ and AgResearch. So, still much higher losses per capita than in the US. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/562350/how-many-public-sector-jobs-have-really-been-axed
@joncounts Those cuts to the health sector are really disappointing. Of course, I care about conservation, education, and science cuts, too.
@cbuddenhagen I guess the bigger question here is how big the NZ government should be relative to our population and the size of our economy. How good do we want our public services to be and how well to we want our environment and economy managed? The World Population Review has a table and map of all the world’s governments relative to their country’s GDP in 2024. NZ was 32nd on the list, a little behind the UK and Iceland and a little ahead of Norway and Canada. It’s seems pretty normal, and average for a developed country. 19 European countries are ahead of us. The US is 49th.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/government-size-by-country
@joncounts I wonder how they deal with the federal versus state government spending in that data? It's surprising anything works in the USA... but it does.