UPDATE: Dairy, not diary
At a fascinating conference on financial globalization sponsored by the Harriman Institute at Columbia, I learned lots of things. One thing was that New Zealand’s biggest trading partner is China (which is not surprising), and that its biggest export is dairy (which is also not surprising). But put these things together and we find that New Zealand has become a dairy-based commodity exporter, fueled in large part by the growth of Chinese demand for milk. Good, wholesome, actual milk, the stuff that New Zealand actually has quite a bit of, and the stuff that emerging economies start to demand as they become more developed. Here is what the data look like, courtesy of Statistics New Zealand.
The level of dependence is economically significant. When Chinese imports of New Zealand milk fall, New Zealand’s entire export balance suffers (see e.g. last February). According…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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