We’ve been having a bit of conversation at home – my son doing a NZ history paper at university and me reading yet another old book – about the line that pops up in almost any old book about the New Zealand economy, that New Zealand once (pre-war) had consistently the highest exports (and imports) per capita of any country.
It isn’t really a surprising statistic. All else equal, small countries tend to sell abroad a larger share of their output than large countries (there isn’t much market at home and the world, by contrast, is big). And rich and productive countries tend to do more per capita of every component of GDP. 80-100 years ago we were small and we were rich – on standard comparisons, inevitably limited as they are, among the two or three richest countries on the planet.
All else equal, we also know that countries…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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