Modelled Territorial Authority GDP for New Zealand

A big project at my work that I was involved with over the past year was the production of modelled estimates of gross domestic product at the District and City level. There are official statistics at the Regional Council level (16 of them in New Zealand), so the aim of this project was to get that extra bit of granularity that makes analysis more meaningful.

Publication was on Wednesday 14 October 2015. Writing about the project here would mix up my work and personal personas, but here’s some links:

• Main page including links to everything else such as the methodology, summary document, and web app
• Interactive web tool, built with R, Shiny and ggvis
• Source code on GitHub. Unfortunately you can’t run this, as it depends on databases only available in the MBIE environment. It’s published to make the methodology more transparent.

The day after MBIE published these, New Zealand Minister for Economic Development the Hon Steven Joyce launched the Regional Economic Activity Report, which includes some slices of the Modelled Territorial Authority GDP plus many, many other datasets at the Regional and Territorial Authority level. It has an interactive web tool that is very fancy indeed, and a mobile app that gives simpler but still powerful access to the same data. This was another big project at my workplace, with the team I used to manage cleaning and tidying data for a database of over 100 data series that was used under the hood for all the products.