Analysing the performance of New Zealand universities in the 2010 Academic Ranking of World Universities

The performance of New Zealand universities taking into account the size of New Zealand’s economy and population

Another way of interpreting the ARWU results is to take into account the size of an economy or the size of a country’s population. Figure 7 presents country-level results with this adjustment. Figure 7 presents the ratio of a country’s percentage share of universities in the top 500 by their share of world gross domestic product and world population.

The results in Figure 7 show that New Zealand has a share of universities in the top 500 of 1 percent, which is five times our share of world gross domestic product (0.2 percent) and makes it the top-performing country using this metric. Once you take into account the relative wealth of the economy, then New Zealand universities perform well. However, the performance of New Zealand is not as strong when taking account share of population. New Zealand is ranked eighth using this measure and is behind Australia.

Figure 7: Country performance in the 2010 Academic Ranking of World Universities