I prefer making New Year's resolutions for other people rather than for myself. And in that spirit, can we make 2016 the year of not obsessing about whether New Zealand Inc. is moving up, down or twirling sideways along some value-added scale?

You are all surely familiar with the usual story. It is pretty standard fare for after-dinner addresses. It goes as follows. New Zealand businesses are all either short-sighted or stupid. Kiwi companies export logs, fruit and milk powder when they could move up the value-chain by selling value-added products like knickknacks made of wood, processed food products, or high-tech milk enzyme derivatives. Sure, many businesses are already doing that, but New Zealand still exports a lot of logs, fruit, and milk powder – and that is a bad thing.

And it is the same story that I heard a lot growing up in Canada. In the 80s and 90s, Canadians agonized over whether they might forever be hewers of wood and drawers of water if they ever stopped subsidizing Canadian aeroplane manufacturer Bombardier.

I remain a bit surprised that Bombardier never tried for a government research grant to investigate modernizing Howard Hughes’ dream of a wooden airplane: imagine the number of times they could have written “value-added” in the application. It would have been impossible for Canadian politicians to resist.

But the story is, in a word, nonsense. Making airplanes when every airplane costs more to make than it is worth to customers should not be counted as value-added high-tech production. It destroys value rather than creating it.

And it is not that different from the fabled East German Trabaant plants that, after reunification, made Volkswagen execs cry: the raw materials going into the plant were worth more than the cars coming out at the other end.

Does that mean that firms should never try to process raw materials or try new things? Hardly! But who is better placed to tell whether logs, milk powder or any other primary product should be exported or processed: the business that stands to gain or lose if it makes the right choice, a bureaucrat at the ministry, or some after-dinner speaker without skin in the game?

The University of Calgary’s Trevor Tombe tallied some of the costs of Canada’s obsession with the value-added mythos. Beware of it in New Zealand as well.