Think of a number, then multiply by five
You will have seen the controversy about the number of jobs in the new Sky City convention center. I don’t have anything to add on the number of employees after it is built, but it’s interesting to see how construction jobs seem to be defined
The company’s report says 150 construction jobs could be created each year over a five-year period, making a total of 750, but they would be filled by people already employed on other projects. (3 News)
The original Horwath report said 150 jobs could be created over a five-year construction period for a total of 750.(Herald)
That is, if you have a five-year construction project that at a typical moment employs 150 people, this creates 750 jobs. If you have a factory, or an office, or a convention center that employs 150 people at any time you would usually say it created 150 jobs — even that wouldn’t actually be true, since it mostly relocates jobs rather than creating them, but at least it’s fairly clear what is meant.
We should clearly hope that the convention center takes more than five years: the longer the construction period, the more jobs are created.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
If they’re jobs that would be filled by people already employed on other projects, then wouldn’t that make them jobs preserved rather than created? It implies that if these jobs weren’t created, then the jobs currently enjoyed by people on other projects would lapse and they would then be jobs lost.
13 years ago
Not even that — if these jobs didn’t happen, many of those people would work on different construction jobs, perhaps in Christchurch. NZ isn’t short of things that need building; we’re short of money.
Overall unemployment, at least outside of recessions, ends up as low as the Reserve Bank thinks is compatible with stable inflation, so ‘job creation’ is a tricky concept.
I would have thought the real ‘economic benefit’ question for NZ is how much new foreign money the convention center brings in, and how that compares to the cost of foreign borrowing needed to build it. But there are real economists out there in the readership.
13 years ago