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New Zealand sees record number of businesses

Xinhua, October 29, 2015 Adjust font size:

The drive to build badly-needed homes has helped drive up the number of businesses in New Zealand past the half million mark for the first time, the government statistics agency said on Thursday.

New Zealand had 502,000 businesses as of February 2015, up almost 2 percent year on year and up 14 percent from 2005, according to Statistics New Zealand.

The number of paid employees passed 2 million, up 2.3 percent year on year.

The construction industry continued to lead the increase, with 3.7 percent more businesses and 6.4 percent more employees in 2015 than in the previous year.

"The increase in the construction industry was mainly due to residential building," business register manager Stuart Pitts said in a statement.

"There were 22,000 employees working in the residential building industry in February 2015, an increase of 11 percent and in line with continued GDP (gross domestic product) growth in this sector since 2013."

The largest increase was in Auckland - home to a third of New Zealand's population - where soaring house prices have been described as a risk to financial stability by the Reserve Bank of New Zealand.

The earthquake-battered Canterbury region came second.

For the fourth year in a row, the number of new businesses was greater than the number that closed.

"Of all the businesses that started up in 2005, 27 percent were still operating in 2015," Pitts said.

"This 10-year survival rate varied across industries, with 36 percent of financial and insurance services businesses carrying on into their 10th year, compared with only 18 percent of information media and telecommunications businesses."

The figures were released the same day as a report ranking New Zealand second - after Singapore - in the best places in the world to do business.

The World Bank's Doing Business report is an annual study measuring government regulations and their effect on business across 189 economies.

"New Zealand has been ranked second for ease of doing business for the second year in a row," Regulatory Reform Minister Steven Joyce said in a statement welcoming the report.

New Zealand ranked first in four of the 10 categories measured, including starting a business, registering property, getting credit and protecting minority investors. Enditem