Researching New Zealand and Fiji

I'm in a law school class that spends most of the semester looking into NZ and Fiji issues. There are 24 of us, and we are divided up into 6 groups of 4; each group will explore a different issue and write a research paper on it, turned in at the end of the semester. My group is Jason Carter, Leah Segall, Michelle Schmit, and myself.

Here's a short profile of them:

Jason is 30, and worked in accounting in San Francisco before law school. He's from New York.

Leah, 27, is from San Francisco (her parents met us at SFO where we were delayed for half a day and brought us delicious home made cookies). She was an investment banker in San Fran before school.

Michelle, 23, is from Sioux City, and came straight to law school from undergrad at Notre Dame. She just won a prestigious award, "Best Speaker," in Northwestern's Moot Court Competition. Although her team didn't win, they were in the final round, so she is obviously very talented at debate; in fact, before law school, she helped run a company that went around the states running student debate workshops




We decided at the beginning of the semester to study Import/Export issues. It was hard to narrow down a specific topic, since it's quite a robust area. Finally we settled on an area we determined to be quite narrow, the tourism industry (although it seems odd to call tourism an "export," it's accurate, which you can see conceptually by thinking about how it's something that's consumed primarily by foreigners, like any other export). Our research will explore how the governments of Fiji/NZ treat tourism from a policy perspective, as well as factors that affect the tourism industry, such as taxes, regulatory environments, climate/natural disasters, etc.

It will be very interesting to compare the two island nations in this regard. Fiji is a low-income country with few natural resources (these are things like ore, or a large labor force, all of which can be exploited to produce income from goods and services). It does have a great deal of coastal land, which can also be considered a natural resource, since this is something that can be exploited to produce a valuable service: tourism. Therefore Fiji's tourism industry makes up a large portion of its GDP.

New Zealand, while also rich in coastal land, has many other natural resources (e.g. diamonds, petroleum, lumber, lamb/dairy and wool, and a highly educated population). As a result, NZ doesn't have to rely as much on the tourism industry for a robust national economy, since it has the ability to produce other goods and services that are highly in demand in the global economy.

And finally, the point of the class is to be able to travel to these countries to experience the areas we are researching first-hand, as well as being able to interview policy-makers and government officials who have a say in the way they are handled at a societal or governmental level.

The other groups are looking into prostitution, education, race, sports, and legal structure. I am really looking forward to reading everyone's reports at the end; it's not often you get to discuss something so intellectual on a daily basis, with people who are so willing to share their findings, and to hear yours.