Peter Ellis

• Led the world-first use of credit card data to show official regional tourism spend
• Transformed a government ministry’s use of economic data with better management, statistical tools and human capability
• Led the devolution of management of a $40 million per year aid program from Canberra to the partner capital, addressing major challenges for human capability building and relationship management
• Led or assisted several countries to review and redevelop their International Visitor Surveys, which included leading to a revision of $2 billion per year to estimates of New Zealand’s savings, household consumption and exports in the National Accounts
• Led development of interactive statistical web tools and mobile applications for regional economic, sector, tourism and labour data for New Zealand.

Before joining Nous, Peter was an independent consultant with clients including the World Bank, Stats NZ and the New Zealand Health Promotion Agency. From 2011 to 2017 he led the transformation of the New Zealand Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment’s economic analytics capability and outputs as the manager of more than 20 data scientists, statisticians and other analysts and as manager of tourism research and evaluation.

Peter’s earlier career was in overseas aid.  This included roles as then director of program evaluation of the Australian overseas aid program, and counsellor development cooperation at the Australian Embassy to Timor-Leste.

Peter likes to walk in the mountains and is the sole author of the Free Range Statistics blog, rated the 13^th best statistics blog on the web.