While nobody likes to lose their job, a new national survey suggests that a sizable chunk of the population have little problem with other people losing theirs if it leads to a faster road out of the recession.

When it comes to finding the best way out of the current recession, the government has been buried in a mountain of opinions, and the latest ShapeNZ survey has added to that pile, with 33% of respondents saying they were in favour of cutting government spending to speed up the recovery, even if it resulted in less private spending and greater short-term unemployment.

Readers may not be surprised to know that this is one of the most market-researched countries in the world on the basis of interviews per capita.

The growth of online interviewing has only added to this. Online interviews are generally cheaper than telephone ones, so budgets can be used to gain much larger, more robust samples than those gained from other methodologies.