NZIER (New Zealand Institute of Economic Research) has a Public Good Fund that supports awards and scholarships, as well as the Data1850 project. Data1850 collates data for New Zealand going back as far as records allow, which is 1850 for some data.
The Data1850 site allows you to create some cool graphics of the data, like this graph of the unemployment rate from 1956 to 2023 (I've suppressed the separate female and male rates, although it is a little annoying that they still show on the legend):
Jason Shoebridge posted on the Asymmetric Information substack, offering some other examples. I should point out that you can't interpret the graph of life expectancy and household income as showing anything important, because two variables with underlying time trends will always look like they are correlated (this is spurious correlation). However, that post was useful in that it reminded me that this excellent resource exists. [*]
Importantly, you can download the underlying data series (in the Resources tab), which are organised into five datasets: (1) Economic activity; (2) People; (3) Prices; (4) International linkages; and (5) Government. Each dataset has data for several different variables.
Try it out for yourself!
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[*] Although it would have been good to remember this before my BUSAN205 students began their group research projects. Having said that, projects using time series data are trickier for students at that level to do well.
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