3.3 Comparator countries Ngā whenua whakataurite

3.3. Comparator countries | Ngā whenua whakataurite

We have chosen seven countries to compare New Zealand with throughout COVID-19 by the Numbers. These include our nearest neighbour, Australia, along with the two other large English-speaking democracies – the United Kingdom and the United States. China was chosen because it is where the first cases were recorded, and Italy because it was one of the first high-income countries to experience major pandemic conditions. Few will forget the scenes on television and websites of overcrowded hospitals with overworked health workers in Lombardy. We included Japan because it is another high-income island economy. Our final comparison country is Sweden, which we have chosen because of its unique, and to many controversial, approach to the pandemic.

There are gaps in the data we use for cross-country comparisons. In some figures we have substituted nearby or otherwise similar countries or jurisdictions; for example, Denmark for Sweden and Hong Kong for China.

In figures that draw on OECD data we have typically included all OECD economies for which there was data. When we present such data, we compare New Zealand against the OECD average rather than the average of the comparator group of countries.