New Zealand is one of only three countries to see life expectancy increase during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The birth rate also rose slightly, although population growth has slowed to the OECD average.
Demographer Professor Paul Spoonley tells Kathryn Ryan Covid-19 has had a major impact upon life expectancy around the high-income world.
Photo: 123rf
“All of the high-income countries bar 3 have seen a significant decline in life expectancy. Just to give you an indicator, the US has seen a drop of two years in life expectancy, so it's not minor, it's very significant.
“The three exceptions are Taiwan, Finland, and New Zealand.”
The reasons for New Zealand’s increased life expectancy are a combination of the relatively low number of Covid-19 deaths at the start of the pandemic and the restrictions brought in which reduced other deaths, Prof Spoonley says.
“There's a very interesting paper by Jennifer Summers, Michael Baker, and Nick Wilson … and [they say] about 2700 deaths were averted by those measures, which is quite an interesting outcome in itself.
Professor Paul Spoonley Photo: RNZ / Katie Scotcher
“And the combination [of those reasons] is that our life expectancy increased by about 8 months through the period of Covid.”
Aotearoa has echoed what has happened globally in that births were initially low as Covid unfolded, with the country reaching its lowest rate since the 1980s in 2020.
“But then we've had a rebound and so in 2021, we had 1000 more births than we've had.
“Now just to put this into context, Kathryn, our birth rate dropped below 60,000 in 2016, and it's still not gone above 60,000, so it's hovering around 58-59,000 and I think long term, this rebound aside, we will see an ongoing decline in the birth rate.”
The withdrawal of some social services, static wages, and rising cost of living are likely to impact upon fertility decisions, he says.
“We have baby calculators, one of the baby calculators estimates that it costs about $285,000 to bring up a child in New Zealand to the age of 18.”
In addition, more children are being born to women aged 40 and above than to women aged 20 and below in the country, Prof Spoonley says.
“What we've seen is a collapse of teenage births. So if we go back 40 years, there's been a decline of 400 percent decline in the number of children being born to teenage mothers in New Zealand.”
Prior to the pandemic, New Zealand had one of the highest population growth rates of OECD countries, he says.
“The average was 0.6 percent for the OECD. We were 2.1 percent, Australia was at 1.5, Canada 1.3.
“So even though Australia and Canada were getting migrants, they simply weren't getting as many migrants as we were.
“Now what's happened is that we've very rapidly collapsed that population growth to exactly the OECD average of 0.6 percent.”
But there was a big surge of migration in 2019 and 2020 as well as 300,000 staying here on temporary work and study visas during lockdown, which means two-thirds of our population growth is from migration and migration gain, he says.
That’s why it’s important to improve our immigration policies and align them with other policies, he says.
“At the moment, our immigration policy, I would suggest, is quite confused, and it's not particularly fit for purpose.
“I don't think people understand how short of labour the high-income world is. At the moment, there are 1.3 million vacant jobs in the UK, and that's half a million more than the normal. In the US, it's 11 million vacant jobs.
“So what we're seeing is this labor crunch around the world, and if we take something like nursing everywhere you go, there is a shortage of nurses.
“In the UK, 40,000 nurses are needed as of today … The UK now by the way is now increasingly focusing on Kenya, Philippines, other parts of Africa to recruit those nurses.”
New Zealand could expect a net loss of people now, he says.
“I think what the Productivity Commission [reports] using those stats have shown is that we're really bad at retention. It doesn't matter what visa category we're talking about, the number of people who stay here in the country longer than two years or longer than five years is actually very, very low.”
Looking at policies to allow not just immediate whānau but also wider family to come with migrants can influence their decision to stay, he says.
“When we talked to migrants, they don't tend to come to New Zealand for economic reasons.
“They come to New Zealand for the lifestyle, so that flexibility around working becomes super important, they come for educational purposes and that's an investment in your children, so we've got to make that happen as well, and they come for the safety of the country.”
Paul Spoonley is an Honorary Research Associate at Massey University's college of humanities and social sciences and chair of Metropolis International, an international network of researchers, policy makers, and community groups engaged in identifying, understanding, and responding to developments in migration and diversity.
