KEY POINTS:
Employers in New Zealand are more concerned about a skills shortage than their equivalents in any other country in the world, a new survey shows.
The "brain drain", whereby our top skilled and educated young people are quitting New Zealand for greener pastures elsewhere, has led to skilled staff being the number one concern among businesses surveyed.
In its latest international business report, Grant Thornton International said 60 per cent of the New Zealand businesses surveyed put skills shortages at the top of their list of expansion constraints.
That made it a greater concern than the traditional bugbears of bureaucracy, the rising dollar, taxation and interest rates.
The figure was up from 38 per cent a year earlier and just ahead of two other southern hemisphere nations, Australia with 59 per cent and South Africa with 58 per cent.
Grant Thornton, an organisation of independently owned and managed accounting and consulting firms, surveyed 7200 owners of medium sized businesses in 32 countries, during September and October 2006. In New Zealand, 150 businesses were surveyed.
New Zealand spokesman Peter Sherwin said red tape or regulation normally had the highest rating in this country.
That concern, while still high, seemed to have stabilised at the same time as the skilled worker shortage escalated, he said.
Despite that, New Zealand was still in the top group when it came to worrying about red tape, with the table headed by Brazil, Russia, Poland and Greece.
Most commentators pointed the finger at the rising New Zealand dollar and interest rates as being a major factor in manufacturing businesses moving operations overseas, Mr Sherwin said.
Those elements had probably been compounded by the fact that New Zealand's migrant flows had not always had the desired worker quality.
"A continuation of this will cause further problems in our economy and we may well see more businesses leave New Zealand to solve their skilled worker shortages or exchange rate problems," he said.
"We need a more balanced economy and we won't get that with a lack of truly skilled workers."
While New Zealand had migrant flows, the skills of those coming in were often not in appropriate areas, Mr Sherwin said.
Nor were the skills at the same level of those that northern hemisphere countries were gaining from their influx of migrants.
Among the survey's findings was that in three Asian countries, Japan, Thailand and China, the most significant concerns were shortages of orders and lack of demand.
- NZPA
