New Zealand
GDP per capita to 2060, by scenario
Constant-rate scenario path; the 2060 endpoint levels are illustrative, not forecasts.
Factor profile
High-income, skilled economies with strong AI adoption, including large aging economies whose diffusion scores offset weaker demographics.
How this economy meets AI
Today’s production, workforce and automation baseline — context for the scenarios, outside the AGI Growth Index.
Where output comes from (% of GDP)
Where people work (% of employment)
Informal employment
Current automation exposure
Several parts of the economy could transmit AI’s effects. The pace depends on adoption by firms, connectivity and movement of workers between sectors.
Sources: World Bank WDI; ILOSTAT; Global Automation Atlas (Garg, Crosta & Baier, 2026). The latest available year is shown for each measure; vintages differ, so shares may not sum to 100.
Where New Zealand starts
New Zealand enters the AGI era as a high-trust diffuser: rich, skilled and quick to put new tools to work. The scores show why. Language inclusion is 4.9 out of 5, near the top, because English is the working language of the frontier. AI diffusion capacity is 4.3, and climate and environmental resilience 4.6. It sits inside the alliance system that governs frontier access, with a geopolitics score of 4, and was Tier 1 in the 2025 US diffusion framework. Physical build speed is 4. What it lacks is capability of its own. Compute and energy access scores 2, and catch-up headroom just 2.1 — at about $49,600 per person there is little ground to make up by copying others. Ten-year trend growth is 2.7% a year. Every scenario turns on whether New Zealand builds its computing power or rents it.
The three paths
These are simulations, not forecasts. The Modest path is the baseline; the two AGI scenarios fork from it. Under the Modest scenario, AI stays a normal technology. New Zealand would gain a small lift on trend: 3.1% growth a year, 69th of 157, with the economy doubling only every 23 years. High adoption would raise productivity, but nothing more. Under Gradual takeoff, growth would climb for two decades and reach 15.5% a year once AGI matures around 2045. That would place New Zealand 9th in the world. The long runway lets its trusted institutions and skilled workers absorb each advance as it lands. An economy growing at 15.5% doubles in under five years. Under Fast takeoff, growth would reach 24.2% a year from the early 2030s, a doubling every three years or so. Yet its rank would slip to 18th, because a fast world rewards the frontier compute New Zealand does not hold. Regulation and politics could slow or redirect any of these paths. How New Zealanders and their leaders respond to transformative AI is a variable the model holds constant.
How you would know which world you are in
The scenarios look almost the same until about 2030. So watch leading indicators, not GDP, and check them yourself rather than trust any snapshot. Three global signals matter most. First, whether the METR task horizon curve keeps doubling every four to five months through 2027–28; METR publishes it at metr.org. Second, whether frontier lab revenue and capital spending keep compounding; Epoch AI tracks both at epoch.ai. Third, whether growth in the ten to twenty most-ready economies — the United States and China above all — breaks above trend in the early 2030s. Double-digit growth there within a couple of years of 2030 would signal a fast world. A point or two above trend by the mid-2030s would signal a gradual one. A fade back to trend would signal a modest one. New Zealand's own signals would arrive sooner than the growth data: fresh hyperscaler commitments beyond the Auckland cloud regions Microsoft and AWS have already opened, business adoption surveys, and new data center demand showing up in Transpower's grid figures.
If growth goes explosive
Explosive is relative. At 15.5% growth a year, New Zealand would still trail the frontier, where the United States would compound at nearly 20%. Under Fast takeoff the gap widens: 24.2% against a frontier near 39%. Yet either rate runs far ahead of New Zealand's own history and its region, where the median is around 6%. The economy would double every three to five years, so a child starting school would finish it in a country several times richer. Services could shift from serving five million people to serving global demand, and rising wages would ease the long pull of young New Zealanders toward Australia. There is a way this leaves New Zealand worse off, and it is worth naming. Its AI runs on compute rented from firms and governments abroad. Capacity priced and controlled elsewhere can be throttled or repriced by decisions New Zealand does not make. The hedge is to own more of the stack — power, land and hosted capacity — rather than stay a comfortable customer. Even then, the pace-setter would shift to the state, testing how fast councils, the courts and the electricity regulator can permit, adjudicate and connect.
What New Zealand can do now
Three levers follow from the scores. Start with the no-regret one. Physical build speed is already a strength at 4, and it carries real weight even if AI stays ordinary, so the task is to protect it, not repair it. That means keeping permitting fast: statutory time limits, one-stop approvals and less room for litigation to stall energy and transmission projects. A cautious government can do this today and lose nothing if the skeptics are right. The second lever is the bet. Compute and energy access, at 2, barely moves growth in a modest world, but under a fast takeoff it becomes New Zealand's single biggest lever. Closing it means packaging renewable power and land to anchor hyperscale investment, and securing chip access through its alliances. The third lever, catch-up headroom at 2.1, is also a bet: staying open to trade, investment and technology transfer keeps the door to fast diffusion open. New Zealand can adapt a working model from its own archetype. Sweden turned cheap hydropower and a cool climate into data center clusters — Meta's Luleå campus runs on renewable power and free cooling. New Zealand's hydro and geothermal offer the same draw. To see how moving these scores changes New Zealand's path under each scenario, open the atlas's policy editor.
Use the policy editor to test how different factor scores change New Zealand’s modeled path. The roadmap builder below can then incorporate those targets into a 1,000-day planning prompt.
Drafted with Claude, Anthropic’s AI model, from the atlas’s data and an editorial template set by the author.
Create a 1000-day AGI and growth roadmap prompt
This prompt can be used with Claude, ChatGPT or an open-weight model hosted on your institution’s systems. It includes the atlas material for New Zealand: the country brief, economic structure, region, archetype and global scenarios. It instructs the model to ask for local information, use existing strategies and the political calendar, and preserve the atlas’s interpretation rules. The prompt is assembled in your browser; the information entered here is not sent elsewhere.
1 · Read the brief → 2 · Set targets in the policy editor → 3 · Generate and copy the prompt → 4 · Run it with an approved model, with high reasoning effort and web access where permitted
Instructions are generated in the selected language; the data annex remains in English. Translations are machine-drafted, and corrections from native speakers are welcome through the contact links on the start page.