SEGRA (Sustainable Economic Growth for Regional Australia) thirteenth national conference, 27-29 October 2009, Kalgoorlie-Boulder, WA [CD ROM]

Author: SEGRA (Sustainable Economic Growth for Regional Australia)

Papers presented include: Climate Change and the Green Revolution: what's in it for regional Australia -- Emissions Trading: an economic business perspective -- Sustainable Mining Futures and the Liveability of Mining Villages -- Delivering and Supporting Indigenous Participation in Regional Development -- Townsville: a regional development case study -- Infrastructure Australia and Smart Sustainable Regions.

Find it at: CD ROM SEG or
Click here, and request a copy from the library!

Booming Bohemia? Evidence from the US High-Technology Industry (journal article)
By David S. Bieri
from Industry & Innovation Vol 17 Iss 1 Feb 2010, pp. 23 - 48
"This paper assesses the effect of Richard Florida's creative class on economic growth and development at two levels of spatial aggregation. First, I examine the dynamics of economic growth across US metropolitan regions and investigate how they relate to regional specialization and the concentration of talent in the high-tech industry. In addition to evidence of significant high-tech clusters, I identify important complementarities with regard to the interaction between the three Ts of regional development (talent, technology and tolerance) and regional growth dynamics. Using firm-level data, the regional analysis is then complemented by exploring the location of new high-technology plant openings and their relationship with university research and development (R&D) and the creative class. Specifically, I test the hypothesis that both university R&D and the presence of “creativity” generate spillovers which are captured locally in the form of new high-tech establishments, after controlling for important location factors such as local cost, demand and agglomeration economies. While the marginal impacts of increased R&D funding on county probability for new firm formation is modest, the mix of creativity and diversity—as proxied by the Florida measure—appears to be a key driver in the locational choice of new high-tech firms. Separate estimates indicate that these findings hold up across the major high-tech industries in the USA."

An Evaluation of the Economic Approaches Used by Policy Actors towards Investment in Place-Based Partnerships in Victoria (journal article)
By Chris McDonald et al
from Australian Journal of Public Administration Vol 69 Iss 1 2010, pp. 9 - 21
"Place-based partnerships are supported by the state and include various organisations and interests within particular geographic areas. The Victorian government has established place-based partnerships to plan and coordinate resource allocation decisions to meet objectives such as economic development and social inclusion. In the literature there are positive and negative views of these partnerships. One view is that they allow regions to build competitive advantage, while another is that they are a means of pursuing a neoliberal policy agenda that seeks to reduce government protection and investment. We help clarify the tensions between positive and negative views of partnerships by examining the economic approaches used by policy actors toward place-based partnerships in Victoria. We find that policy actors combine neoclassical and institutionalist approaches to argue that partnerships generate networks that enable more efficient and equitable resource allocation within places."

Designing local skills strategies [online]

Edited by: Francesca Froy, Sylvain Giguère, Andrea Hofer/ OECD

Drawing from a wide array of case studies, this book analyses best-practice local strategies for increasing workforce skills. And it also takes a close look at the opportunities and challenges presented by international migration. The in-depth case studies in this report range from Shanghai's "Highland of Talent Strategy" to new "career ladders" which help immigrants escape low-skilled, low-paid employment in New York. National and local-level recommendations on local skills development are provided, for both OECD and non-OECD countries.

Regions matter : economic recovery, innovation and sustainable growth [online]
Author: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)
Why do some regions grow faster than others, and in ways that do not always conform to economic theory? This is a central issue in today's economic climate, when policy makers are looking for ways to stimulate new and sustainable growth.

OECD work suggests that there is no one-size-fits-all answer to regional growth policy. Rather, regions grow in very varied ways and the simple concentration of resources in a place is not sufficient for long-term growth. This report draws on OECD analysis of regional data (including where growth happens, country-by-country), policy reviews and case studies.

Affordability Report : a quarterly update on the affordability of housing [online]

Authors: HIA Economics Group; Commonwealth Bank

"Report on housing affordability for first home buyers. Contains analysis for each state and territory, excluding NT but including non-metro areas. Report contains:
* Affordability indices for all states and territories (except NT), metro and regional
* National median incomes and minimum repayments for a median priced home
* A rolling 6 quarters of original house price data for - Established dwellings, Detached Houses;- Established Dwellings, Units;- Established Dwellings, Total; and - New Dwellings, Total."

The Determinants of Population and EmploymentGrowth in Small Queensland Regions (journal article)
by Bernard Trendle
from Economic Analysis and Policy, Vol 39 No 2 September 2009
"This paper investigates the determination of population and employment changes for the 125 Local Government Areas of Queensland over the 1996–06 period. The intention is to determine the flow of causality from employment to population growth and/or vice versa. Unlike previous similar studies, the role of geographic location is formally investigated using techniques from the field of spatial data analysis. Overall, results of previous research are confirmed, in that there is some evidence of bi-directional causality. However, spatial effects are found to be important in the process of regional growth, with regional economic performance in part, determined by the outcomes experienced in neighbouring regions."

One economics, many recipes : globalization, institutions, and economic growth [book]

Author: Dani Rodrik

"A definitive statement of Rodrik’s original and influential perspective on economic growth and globalization, [this book] shows how successful countries craft their own unique strategies -and what other countries can learn from them." - cover.

Request to borrow this book by clicking here.

Governing regional development policy : the use of performance indicators [online]

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)

"Examines both the challenges and the opportunities associated with designing and using indicator systems as a tool for the governance of regional development policy." - abstract.

New regions and regionalisation through clusters: City-regions and new problems for the periphery (journal article)
By Mike Danson
from International Journal of Public Sector Management Vol 22 Iss 3 2009, pp. 260 - 271
"The purpose of this paper is to introduce the role of territory in (city-) regionalisation and to revisit the problems of distance from the core in cluster strategies. The paper further aims to discuss the implications of how agglomeration and networking economies, strongly promoted and based on city regions, are being realised across national boundaries."

SEGRA (Sustainable Economic Growth for Regional Australia) twelfth national conference, 18-20 August 2008, Albury, NSW [CD ROM]

Source: Sustainable Economic Growth for Regional Australia Conference

Key themes include: 'Delivering sustainable economic development', 'Showcasing innovative policy responses, actions and decision making techniques', 'Tools and models for regional development', and 'Identifying the latest trends impacting regional Australia'.

Like to borrow this one? Click here to send an email to the library.

The Cost of not paying attention : how interruptions impact knowledge worker productivity [online]

Authors: Jonathan B. Spira & Joshua B. Feintuch

"Interruptions now consume 28% of the knowledge worker's day ... this translates into 28 billion lost man-hours per annum to companies in the United States alone. ... It would be an understatement to say that attention management - the area of management science dealing with interruptions - merits immediate attention." - page 4.

Balanced national development policy in Korea : theory and practice [book]

Author: Korea. Presidential Committee on Balanced National Development

Outlines how South Korea's change in economic policy has resulted in a knowledge-based economy where innovation and economic growth occurs in regional areas, and not just in metropolitan areas.

Regional Unemployment Disparities: An Evaluation of Policy Measures (journal article)
By N Groenewold and A J Hagger
from Australian Economic Papers Vol 47 Iss 4 2008, pp. 355- 375
"This paper analyses the efficacy of regional and federal government policies in reducing inter-regional unemployment disparities. We use as our framework a two-region general equilibrium model with a given freely-mobile supply of labour. We assume inter-regional migration to occur in response to inter-regional utility differentials. Each region has households, firms and a regional government. In addition to regional governments, there is a federal government. The firms in a region use a single factor, labour, to produce a single good which we assume to be different to that produced in the other region. It is supplied to households and to the regional government in the form of payroll taxes. Households consume some, trade some with households in the other region and give some up to the federal government as income tax. Firms and households bargain over wages and firms then choose employment to maximise profits. The resulting equilibrium will generally not be a full-employment one.
We simulate a linearised numerical version of the model. We examine seven alternative policies, six carried out by a regional government and one by the federal government. In the first group there are traditional tax/expenditure polices as well as policies which might be seen as attacking the natural rate of unemployment: changes in unemployment benefits, changes in union power, changes in the labour force and changes in labour productivity. The federal government policy is a regionally-differentiated fiscal policy.
Contrary to expectations, many policies which have traditionally been recommended to alleviate unemployment are found, in fact, to exacerbate the unemployment problem."

Queensland sugar: where to from here (journal article)
by John Hine
from Food and Drink Business, November 2008
"The conclusion about the Queensland sugar industry is that there has been much change over the last few years, but with much more change likely in terms of commercial structures, possible new players, new technologies and new products over the next 5-10 years. Might there be a major new multinational investor in Far North Queensland to make industrial chemicals from sugar cane? Mozambique has a 30,000 hectare sugar cane project to make ethanol, can't we do the same?"
Contact the library for a copy of this article.

Projects Queensland [CD ROM / journal]

Author: Queensland. Dept of Infrastructure & Planning

"Outlines 603 projects with total values of more than $30 million. The publication lists all the projects under study, committed to and under construction, as well as those that were completed between April 2007 & June 2008." - introduction.

A Functionalist Framework for Identifying Business Clusters: Applications in Far North Queensland. (journal article)
by Adee Athiyaman and Celik Parkan
in Australian Journal of Management, June 2008, Vol 33 No 1, pp201-229
The extant literature on industry-cluster identification recommends the use of both quantitative and qualitative data to uncover clusters. We argue for a functionalist approach to identifying clusters. The logic here is that since spatial proximity of firms is an observed fact, attempts to uncover business clusters should begin with a statistical test of the randomness of firm density in a region. Rejection of this hypothesis should lead to an inter-firm analysis that identifies the relationships among firms in the region. Data from a regional area in the state of Queensland, Australia, are employed to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed framework

Local development benefits from staging major events [e-book]

Author: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)
"Identifies how staging international events works as a trigger for local development, and what hosting cities and nations can do to ensure that a positive local legacy and wider benefits are realised." - executive summary.
Click here to access.

Refereed proceedings of the 31st annual conference of the Australian and New Zealand Regional Science Association International [CD ROM]

Edited by: Paul Dalziel

Papers include: "Effects of drought on small business in regional Queensland", "Measuring Queensland wellbeing: a Central Queensland case study", and "What drives regional export performance?"

Click here to borrow book.

Competitive identity : the new brand management for nations, cities and regions [book]
Simon Anholt

Chapters include: ’Brand management and the nation’, ’Where national reputation comes from’, ’Measuring city brands’, ’Developing the identity, developing the strategy’, and ’Tourism and Competitive Identity’.

Click here to order this book.