One expert is warning the worst is yet to come for New Zealand's economy as the country sees further fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic.
New Zealand's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) figures came out yesterday, showing a decrease by 1.6 per cent in the first quarter of 2020.
It's the biggest quarterly fall in 29 years, but that figure only includes one week of lockdown. It looks at GDP for the first three months of 2020.
Economist Bernard Hickey says the real amount will be seen in the June quarter.
"That's when the hit's going to come," Mr Hickey told TVNZ1's Breakfast today.
“It’s gonna take a couple of years to get back to where we were last year. Really this is just a prelude to the main game."
Mr Hickey says the recovery phase is also going to have to be done without a big chunk of the country's main bread winners, like tourism.
Gross domestic product for the first three months of 2020 registered their biggest quarterly fall in 29 years. (Source: Other)
"We’ve gone from 11,000 people a day to 250. That is going to hammer your tourism sector. It's also going to hammer your international education sector and it means that we’re not getting the demand coming in from all these extra people.
"We just have to learn to run our economy without... We might have to reengineer some of our businesses make them more efficient, more productive."
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