A new measure produced by Massey University is designed to track New Zealand's prosperity beyond just the headline numbers.

The tracker - Prosperity Live - has been developed by Professor Christoph Schumacher, and includes measures of education, employment, health, housing, income, safety, social wellbeing and work-life balance.

On Tuesday, the tracker was 0.2 percent down on the day before.

On an annual basis, employment, health and income were down, and the overall tracker was down 0.1 percent.

Education, social wellbeing and work-life balance had not moved, and housing and safety were up.

Schumacher said the housing measure, which showed a 7.1 percent improvement, looked at price-to-income data.

"The reason for the upward trend is the decrease in house prices and a lower OCR, which makes housing more affordable overall."

He said safety was measured by the national homicide rate and perceived safety in communities based on data from the police, Stats NZ, wellbeing surveys and Google Trends.

"While overall prosperity is calculated daily - with daily data that serve as proxies and a machine-learning algorithm has learned how to link changes in our daily data to the overall change in prosperity - the individual dimensions are measured only every six months.

"Dimensions with zero percent change simply have not changed in the past six month. This is not too surprising with dimensions that are inherently subjective.

"Perceived work-life balance or wellbeing might not change much within a short time frame."

He said the index would pick up dramatic events, such as the drop during the global financial crisis (GFC), the Christchurch earthquake and Covid.

"The sharp increase in 2020 was driven by an increase in social connectedness, work-life-balance and feeling of safety. This picks up the change when people worked from home, connected more with others and felt safe in NZ.

"The drop that followed was when life went back to 'normal'. The 2023 increase was driven by a reasonably big increase in safety.

"With global tension increasing substantially in 2023, maybe Kiwis felt very safe."

Schumacher expected the index to drop from here.

"The economy contracted in Q2 and unemployment is increasing, which should negatively impact on overall prosperity.

"Gross Domestic Product is important, but prosperity is about so much more than just economic growth. Prosperity Live allows us to track whether New Zealand is flourishing across multiple dimensions - it's a living, breathing measure of how we're doing as a nation."