Who actually carries the cost — and who gets the benefit?
VECTR is New Zealand's economics platform: scenario analysis across the whole economy. A national number hides as much as it shows — the same run that tells you what a decision does to GDP also tells you where that lands — which regions, which sectors, which communities gain, and which quietly absorb the loss. This page is about what you could ask once you can see that far down.
For the questions you get asked in the room: what did the money actually buy, who did it reach, and who carried the cost.
You could see where the money actually goes.
Spend $60M and the headline says “jobs created.” VECTR can tell you the part that doesn't make the headline: which districts the benefit concentrates in, how far it travels beyond them, and who ends up worse off even when the country is better off overall.
“We're funding a regional infrastructure package. Where does the benefit really concentrate — and who misses out?”
VECTR: where the spend lands, by district and by industry — and where it doesn't. Distribution is reported wherever the data supports it, and withheld where it could identify anyone. You target the gap before it becomes a headline.
The Māori economy, as something you can actually measure.
Most models can't tell you what a policy does to the Māori economy — it isn't in the structure, so it isn't in the answer. VECTR carries Māori Economic Attribution: a separate accounting circuit for Māori-owned capital, labour and output, inside the model itself. So the question becomes answerable instead of rhetorical.
Māori asset base
What a shock or a settlement does to the value of Māori-owned capital — enterprises, land, portfolios — in dollars and as a share of the base.
Whānau employment
Where Māori employment sits in the economy, built from the sectoral make-up of Māori labour in each of the 87 modelled areas — not a national ratio applied to everyone.
Regional Māori GDP
Māori economic activity as a distinct flow in the input-output structure — so a governance board can quantify its footprint and see how a shock travels through it.
“This settlement is worth $X. Five years on — did the expected benefit actually materialise, and where did it spill over to?”
An answer could trace: the asset base against the projection · which sectors the activity shows up in · how far the flow-on travelled beyond the region it started in. The kind of monitoring that's usually impossible after the cheque clears.
Whether people are actually better off — per dollar spent.
GDP and jobs matter, but they don't tell you if a dollar of public money bought a dollar of well-being. VECTR can put the two side by side: well-being (hauora) gained against economic cost — the welfare question every minister eventually asks.
“What would it take to put affected households back where they were — and which intervention does the most good per dollar?”
VECTR returns the welfare result beside the economic one, and how evenly the gain or the loss is spread across regions and sectors. Put two policies next to each other and you can see which one leaves people better off relative to what it costs — not just which one moves output more.
For social investment, that's often the number that matters most. It reframes a spending decision as a return-on-investment decision — in the language a finance portfolio already speaks.
The work that doesn't show up in the statistics.
When a shock hits, some communities absorb it through unpaid labour — childcare, elder care, marae upkeep — long before it shows in formal figures. VECTR tracks unpaid work and the shadow economy by region, so you can see who carries a shock invisibly, and where official statistics drift furthest from reality.
“Where will this cut be absorbed quietly — before it ever reaches our dashboards?”
An answer could flag the regions where informal and unpaid work rises to fill the gap — the places that look fine on paper while carrying the most. Useful for getting support to where it's actually needed, not just where it's visible.
Answers that arrive already checked.
Every VECTR output passes through a Social Auditing Layer before you see it — a programmatic step, not a checklist stapled on afterward. It applies New Zealand's public-sector data-ethics rules, with a Tiriti advisory on every result and the Australian APS framework on top, so the result is safe to put in front of Cabinet.
Confidentiality
Outputs are suppressed automatically where a population or sample is too small to report safely — Stats NZ rules, applied before you see the number.
Fairness flags
If a policy makes the country better off but a specific group measurably worse off, that's flagged — before publication, not after the complaint.
Sample adequacy
Where a region's data is sparse, the confidence is stated plainly. No silent degradation; you know where the numbers are strong.
Misrepresentation guard
Stops the usual misuses — cherry-picking one favourable metric, presenting regional results at national scale, reading short-run as long-run.
Checked before you see it — and findable afterwards. Every run mints a unique run ID, printed on the report as a 2D barcode, so the number you take into the room can be produced again, exactly as it was, when someone asks for it weeks later. A Prove It feature is coming: the full derivation of any output, back to checkable public data.
In te reo Māori, when it matters.
Measure names, report headings, and interface labels carry te reo Māori alongside English — a consequence of the way the product was built, not a translation step bolted on at the end. For governance settings where presenting evidence in te reo is a practical requirement, the report comes that way with no manual rework.
A straight note on co-design
Version 1 of VECTR was not built through Māori-led co-design. That's a real limitation, and it's stated here rather than buried. The cultural and social features were built to treat Māori economic dimensions as structural — part of the model, not an add-on — but structure is not the same as co-design.
Engagement with iwi and hapū is ongoing, and that feedback shapes future versions. If you find content that is culturally inappropriate or factually wrong, please tell us: [email protected].