National and Regional Socio-Economic Change

[Convenors: O’Connor U Melbourne and Harding U Canb].

Drawing on the work of the Paradigm Working Groups, the focus will be on investigating and conducting analysis and modelling to interrogate and expose the dimensions and causes of regional and local outcomes of national changes in an array of socio-economic measures. Emphasis for project development includes analysing and modelling population change, labour market performance, industry and business structure, income distribution, health outcomes, and locational advantage/disadvantage.

Innovations and project development will be in:

1. benchmarking regional and local performance against national performance;
2. modelling the regional and local effects of periodicities in national economic indicators and develop new measures to help explain associations between national, regional and local dynamics;
3. extending  the foundations laid by census and other aggregate data analysis using multi-variate socio-economic spatial analysis such as spatial regression, micro-simulation and spatially disaggregated econometric modelling, to more accurately specify regional and local outcomes;
4. linking diverse sources of information such as sample survey-based data, ABS Labour Force, Health, Housing and Income and Expenditure survey results and business and income tax information to new measures of socio-economic, health and well-being outcomes;
5. investigating the degree to which economic activities are concentrating/agglomerating while others are dispersing/deconcentrating across the settlement hierarchy and within cities to test the validity of convergence/divergence hypothesis in regional development.