The distribution of advantage in Aotearoa New Zealand: Exploring the evidence

This paper is one in a series of detailed background papers that support the Treasury’s Wellbeing Report. In the Wellbeing Report, Treasury is required to describe the state of wellbeing in this country and how it has changed over time. An earlier background paper summarised trends between 2000 and 2020 in the 12 domains of wellbeing in the Treasury’s Living Standards Framework (The Treasury, 2022a). In that paper the Treasury reported that life is better for some people than for others and that life has got better over time in some ways but worse in others. In other words, the state of wellbeing in this country is distributed in complex ways across us as a people, some of us being more advantaged than others. This paper examines this complex multi-dimensional distribution of advantage in more detail. We look at the extent to which multiple types of material and non-material advantage and disadvantage are clustered together, the extent to which advantage and disadvantage are persistent and some of the key sources of advantage and disadvantage.