Reregulation and the Development of the New Zealand Wine Industry

Abstract

New Zealand's wine industry has enjoyed a period of rapid growth since the mid-1980s. This period of growth coincides with the period of trade liberalisation and other neo-liberal reforms to the state that have dominated New Zealand's social economy in the last two decades. Political commentators and economists have cited the growth of the wine industry as an example of the efficacy of the reform programme. One account, prepared in the series Studies in APEC Liberalisation (the APEC report; Mikic, 1998), has proven to be particularly influential. It attributes the wine industry's recent growth to the free trade policies that guide contemporary economic policy in New Zealand. In this paper, I use a critique of the APEC report as a heuristic device to develop a more refined history of the New Zealand wine industry and its recent success, and the part played in these by regulatory change. The paper draws on an evolutionary perspective on industry development (Storper, 1997) and a real regulation conceptualisation of policy formation (Clark, 1992; Moran et al., 1996). It portrays the industry's development as occurring through enterprise choices that are embedded within a range of interconnected social and spatial contexts, of which the state forms an important part. I highlight the effects of technological change, the influence of enterprise evolution, the geography of production, the wider suite of legislative changes affecting the industry and its internal formation. New Zealand wine enterprises have responded to changing production, market and regulatory conditions, as well as their own developmental trajectories.