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Case Study Of The Sa2s In Australia

Decent Essays

The regional internal net population flow data from 2006 to 2014 financial years (FY) at the SA2 level are downloaded from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) . The SA2s in Australia are general-purpose medium-sized areas, aiming to represent a community that interacts together socially and economically. For example, population of SA2s usually ranges from 3,000 to 25,000 persons, and has an average about 10,000 persons . Considering that the State Government policies influence agribusiness and peoples’ movement substantially, we restrict our case study within 102 SA2 areas in the NSW state, see Figure 1. The case study region (i.e., the MDB in NSW) represents approximately 56.5% of the total land area of NSW and approximately 39% to …show more content…

We also observe that net population flows are decreasing among 73% of the SA2s during the study period (Figure 2).

2.2 Socio-economic data

Employment is often a key indicator of the population movement. Hence, we include the unemployment rate (%) in our modelling. The quarterly unemployment rate data are obtained from SLA Markets publications, the Department of Employment, Australian Government. To minimise the variability inherent in small area estimates, the Department provides smooth data, i.e., a four-quarter average, at the SA2s from 2010. Before 2010 data are only available at the SLA . The SLA has a spatial misalignment with the SA2, and to overcome this issue we use the dynamic spatial modelling technique (Bakar et al., 2015) and estimate the quarterly unemployment rate from 2006 to 2009 at the SA2 level. Details of the modelling approach are provided in the supplementary section. To match the yearly time-series format of the net population flow data, we aggregate the unemployment data at the FY level and consequently calculate the maximum and the average unemployment rate at each SA2s.

Figure 3 shows a boxplot of the average unemployment rate over the years. We observe that the last four FY years (2011 to 2014) have high volatilities, which indicate a decrease on the unemployment rate at some SA2s and an increase at others. This also reflects the

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