The Māori economy is not a footnote.
Most economic models treat indigenous economies as a residual — a line item derived by subtraction, if they appear at all. VECTR was built differently. The iwi economic circuit, hauora well-being measures, and ethnic dimension tracking are structural features of the model, not afterthoughts bolted on after launch.
What happens to the Māori economy when policy changes?
That question sounds simple, but answering it properly requires tracking asset ownership, employment by ethnicity, business revenue flows within Māori enterprises, Treaty settlement portfolios, and the downstream effects of regional spending — all simultaneously, across every region. VECTR does this because the model was built with a dedicated iwi economic circuit that maintains separate accounting for Māori-owned capital, labour, and output.
This means you can ask questions like: if a cyclone damages the Bay of Plenty's infrastructure, what happens to Māori employment in that region specifically? How much capital value do iwi asset portfolios lose? And how does the recovery path differ for the Māori economy compared to the regional total? These are not hypothetical extensions — they are measures the model produces natively.
Iwi Asset Growth
Tracks changes in the capital value of Māori-owned assets — Treaty settlement portfolios, commercial enterprises, land holdings — in response to economic shocks and policy interventions. Reported in dollar terms and as a percentage of the pre-shock base, broken down by region.
Whānau Employment
Employment impacts disaggregated by ethnicity and region. Not derived by applying a national ratio to regional totals — calculated from the actual sectoral composition of Māori labour supply in each of the 104 regions. Shows headcount changes and percentage shifts by sector.
Regional Māori GDP
The contribution of Māori economic activity to regional gross domestic product, tracked as a distinct flow within the model's input-output structure. Allows iwi governance boards to quantify their economic footprint and measure how external shocks propagate through Māori-specific channels.
Treaty Context Analysis
Designed for use in Treaty settlement planning and post-settlement monitoring. The model can quantify the economic impact of a proposed settlement, track whether the expected benefits materialise, and identify spillover effects on neighbouring regions and sectors.
Collective Behaviour Correction
Standard models assume every household acts alone — selling assets independently, competing individually. VECTR models collective economies explicitly: communal land, pooled resources through whānau and hapū, shared recovery. A structural bias corrected.
Unpaid Work & Shadow Economy
Unpaid labour — childcare, elder care, marae maintenance — tracked by ethnicity and region as a measured input to the shadow economy. Reveals which communities absorb shocks through invisible work, which recover first, and where formal statistics diverge furthest from reality.
Economics and well-being are not separate questions.
Traditional CGE models stop at GDP and employment. Those numbers matter, but they don't tell you whether people are actually better off — whether their purchasing power increased, whether the services they depend on became more or less accessible, whether the distribution of gains was fair or concentrated. VECTR includes well-being measures because economic modelling that ignores these dimensions produces policy advice that is, at best, incomplete.
The Hauora-Efficiency measure captures whether a policy intervention improves well-being outcomes relative to its economic cost. It is not a single number — it is a composite that reflects health expenditure efficiency, income adequacy, and distributional equity within the affected population. For iwi and social organisations, this is often the measure that matters most, because it answers the question their stakeholders actually ask: are people's lives getting better?
Equivalent Variation (EV)
How much money would you need to give every affected household to make them exactly as well off as they were before the shock? This is one of the most powerful measures in welfare economics, and VECTR calculates it for every scenario — disaggregated by region, sector, and ethnicity. When a minister asks "how much would it cost to make people whole again," this is the number.
Te Reo was considered from the start.
Māori language considerations informed the naming, labelling, and placement decisions throughout VECTR's development. Measure names, report headings, and interface elements carry Te Reo Māori alongside English — not as a feature that was added later, but as a consequence of the internationalisation architecture being designed before the first line of application code was written. The label system, measure names, report templates, and user interface strings are maintained in parallel.
The architecture supports additional languages through the same mechanism. For Māori organisations operating in Treaty contexts, the ability to present economic evidence in Te Reo is a practical requirement for many governance settings — and the model accommodates this without any manual translation step between the analysis and the report.
Built to track more than one population.
The model maintains ethnicity data for Māori, Pasifika, Indian, Chinese, and Pākehā populations. This is not five separate models — it is one integrated structure where ethnic dimensions are woven into the labour supply, household consumption, and asset ownership matrices.
Māori tracking is the deepest because the datasets to support it exist: Māori-owned businesses are identifiable through Te Puni Kōkiri and Statistics New Zealand datasets, Treaty settlement values are public record, iwi asset registers are increasingly available. The other ethnic dimensions are maintained within the data structure to support future enrichment as more granular datasets become available — from community organisations, census improvements, and targeted research.
This is honest design: we built what the data supports today, and structured the model so it grows as the data grows. No dimension was included for appearance and no dimension was excluded for convenience.
VECTR SAL: ethics embedded at the code level.
The Social Auditing Layer is not a review checklist or a PDF that gets attached to the report. It is a programmatic layer within the VECTR pipeline that applies data ethics checks to every output before it reaches the user. The framework it implements is the APS Data Ethics Framework — the Australian Public Service data ethics standard published by the Department of Finance — which was selected because it is one of the most rigorous and well-documented public sector data ethics frameworks available in the region.
What does this mean in practice? Every VECTR report is checked for statistical confidentiality thresholds, distributional fairness flags, sample size adequacy, and potential for misrepresentation. If the model produces a result based on a region or ethnic group with a small population, the SAL flags this before the analyst sees it — not after. The ethics checking happens in the pipeline, not in the review meeting.
Confidentiality
Automatic suppression of outputs where the underlying population or sample is too small to report safely. Follows Stats NZ confidentiality rules and APS guidelines for minimum cell counts.
Distributional Fairness
Flags when a policy intervention produces disproportionate negative impacts on specific populations. If a scenario makes the country better off overall but measurably worse off for one ethnic group, that gets flagged before publication.
Sample Adequacy
When a scenario involves a region with sparse data, the SAL reports the confidence level explicitly — no silent degradation. Users know exactly where the numbers are strong and where they should be treated as indicative.
Misrepresentation Guard
Prevents common misuses: cherry-picking a single favourable metric while ignoring negative ones, presenting regional results at national scale, or extrapolating short-run effects as long-run predictions. The report template enforces balanced presentation.
A note on co-design
Version 1 of VECTR was not created using Māori-led co-design, though that was the product team's preference from the outset. The development priorities, timeline constraints, and resource availability meant the initial build proceeded primarily with Pākehā engineering and economics expertise. Engagement with iwi and hapū is ongoing, and the team is committed to incorporating feedback from Māori researchers, practitioners, and governance bodies into future versions.
The cultural and social features described on this page represent the product team's best effort to build a model that takes Māori economic dimensions seriously as structural features — not cosmetic additions. We know this work is not finished, and we welcome scrutiny. If you identify content that is culturally inappropriate or factually incorrect, contact [email protected] for immediate attention.
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