Growing New Zealand's population by allowing a large number of immigrants in is not the answer to becoming a richer country, according to an economic expert.
Former Reserve Bank economist and blogger Michael Reddell says the country's immigration policy is "well-intentioned, but wrong".
"There's a genuine belief among the economic elites and political elites out there and has been for decades that growing New Zealand's population is the path to prosperity for New Zealanders and I think the evidence on that just isn't there -it hasn't been really ever since World War II," Mr Reddell told RadioLIVE.
"We've brought in tens of thousands of people a year for the last 25 years and we've just continued to slowly drift behind the rest of the world."
A rapidly growing population means the country constantly needs to invest in building more infrastructure, says Mr Reddell.
"The way you get rich as a country is to find stuff that you can sell to the rest of the world, but when you have a rapidly growing population what you have to do is use your resources to build the roads, factories, shops, hospitals, for more people – so we give a good lifestyle to the people who are coming in but we don't make ourselves better off."
Even if the country's population was to grow to 20 million, we wouldn't see huge increase in the nation's wealth, because of New Zealand's isolated location.
"I doubt that 20 million would make the difference. Twenty million over islands this big is still a relatively dispersed population a long way from anywhere. Maybe at 200 million it would be different, maybe we'd be like Japan…but we're so far from anywhere, it's just not the sort of place that firms will naturally base themselves to generate high-performing firms."
Mr Reddell says he believes the Government should reduce the yearly immigration targets from around 40,000- 45,000 to 10,000-15,000.
"Immigration isn't the answer."
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