A Good Worker is Hard to Find: Skills Shortages in New Zealand Firms

This paper examines the determinants of firms’ skill shortages, using a specially-designed survey, the Business Strategy and Skills (BSS) module of the Business Operations Survey. We combine the BSS module with additional data on firms in the Statistics New Zealand’s prototype Longitudinal Business Database (LBD). We focus on vacancies that were hard-to-fill because the applicants lacked the necessary skills, qualification or experience - which we define as skill-related reasons (skill shortage vacancies). We also contrast these with vacancies that were hard-to-fill for non-skill-related reasons.