This project is an interactive data visualisation tool which allows users to explore and understand industry diversity and concentration across New Zealand.
Potential applications for this tool includes promoting innovation and facilitating resilience planning for local and national governments by
1) identifying areas with high industry concentration (such as dependency on tourism) and,
2) reducing complacency by illustrating the flux in industry domination over time.
It may also be of use to the working population, by identifying areas with a high concentration of jobs that match their skills sets.
We sourced data on the number of employees per industry from Statistics New Zealand and determined the industry diversity by calculating the coefficient of variance of the spread of labour between industries for each area. These values were then used to generate a heatmap of New Zealand, with regions coloured from green (high diversity) to red (low diversity). The user can interact with the heatmap to view the industry diversity over time (from 2000 to 2016) by dragging a sliding scale. For a more in-depth breakdown, the user can select a region on the map to generate a pie chart for that area showing the split of workers by industry. The user can also interact with this data over time, by dragging the sliding scale.
In future, overlaying additional datasets, such as regional GDP and unemployment, and further stratification of the data (e.g. distribution of a single industry across the country) would allow further insights to be drawn.
