There are small beams of light peeping through for the economy, but don't get excited about a recovery just yet. It's uneven, and not for everyone.

Tourists are coming back, manufacturing is picking up, our primary industries are doing well and that's filtering into South Island cities. We're seeing some good company results, inflation is down and the services sector is finally seeing some growth.

We should see economic expansion in the third and fourth quarters this year.

That's the good news.

The bad news is, improvement is slight and sometimes marginal; unemployment, especially youth unemployment, is still high; America's erratic leadership and war in the Middle East continues to create uncertainty; Auckland is dragging its feet; small business liquidations are at record numbers; there's political uncertainty and we could be in for a long, very dry summer.

And not everyone will be caught in the uplift. The South Island is well ahead of the North, and a large sector of the population is still struggling with the cost of living.

Today on The Detail we look at where there are encouraging signs and where the uncertainty remains, plus the tiny Central Otago town of Naseby and how it's feeding into, and off of, this pickup in the economy - trading in on its natural beauty and a tourist taste for adventure.

The economic data is coming thick and fast. For example, tourism, our second biggest export earner, saw 3.6 million overseas visitor arrivals in the year to June - 300,000 more than last year. We've seen an all-time record for Australians visiting, and a big increase in Chinese tourists.

One of the more interesting figures is how much ready-mixed concrete was poured - a million cubic metres in the June quarter, up 12 percent on the same time last year.

Andrew Kelleher, the executive director of financial services company Shaw and Partners, jokes that he always looks forward to getting that figure.

"It's sort of the foundation for most building projects, isn't it? You don't build unless you've got some concrete in there somewhere."

The figure is the solid evidence that building consents are translating into actual work.

But the figures also show a clear difference between north and south.

"This is so evident in almost all of the data that we see, the housing market is the most stark illustration of it ... where you've seen very different experiences in these markets from the two big urban areas of Auckland and Wellington versus what's happening in the South Island.

"A lot of this is to do with what I call proximity to primary produce markets. Somewhere like the Canterbury region and Christchurch itself, it's very close to what's happening in dairy, whereas you go to Auckland, you go to Wellington ... Wellington you have a lot of government sector there, Auckland much more services and manufacturing based and you're just seeing completely different outcomes in these two places.

"So it's very much a two-speed and a bifurcation of what's going on."

He says normally when New Zealand's done well economically there's a combination of three factors behind it - a house price boom, increasing numbers of people coming into the country, and a government spending splurge.

"You could argue that we certainly haven't got two of them right now - we haven't got the house prices booming, and we're not importing lots of people. And then we could probably have ongoing debates, robust debates ... about what is the actual level of government spending because it hasn't actually dropped very much since the coalition government has been in power.

"If we can get a recovery that isn't dependent on simply speculation in the housing market and house prices rising, that's a good thing."

It means first home buyers have more access to the market, which is a positive, but it does take away the feel-good factor from people whose real estate is getting more valuable, who might otherwise be out, happy to spend money.

"But if we're building a more productive economy, and if we're building an economy based not on speculation but based on doing some real stuff, that's probably a good thing but I don't know if we're going to see it be quite as frothy as it might be, and certainly not felt as universally as if it was based on house prices going up."

Kelleher says there are still real pockets out there where people won't feel the effect of improvement, "and this becomes quite topical given we've got an election in November".

"We're running out of time for that sort of feel-good factor of economic growth to actually reach into households around New Zealand."

Alan MacDonald, the head of advocacy and strategy at the Employers and Manufacturers Association, says all the conversation about manufacturing improvement has concentrated on what's been driven by the primary sector in the regions, but the figures also tell a bit of "an underplayed story".

"If you look at the Performance and Manufacturing Index, that's had quite a good run over the last 12 months or so. It's a good solid data set and it tells a pretty reasonable story at the moment that underpins that recovery piece."

Food production is always a factor, "but we do some really smart stuff, some of the stuff we do around composites and things like that, the stuff that goes into rockets for Rocket Lab and it goes into Formula 1 cars, the big racing yachts and that sort of stuff. It's not unique to us but it's something we're very good at.

"We're also good at a whole lot of niche engineering things, so you go around some of the warehouses and things that our members typically hang out in and they're doing some great stuff. For example laser-guided mowing systems ... who does that? Well actually there's a company down in the Bay of Plenty that does that, and they export it, and they're mowing 80 or so golf courses in the US."

You can also get in touch with us by emailing thedetail@rnz.co.nz