Issue 2

Professor Mike Hefferan, Professor Bruce Wilson, Adjunct Professor Paul Collit,s Dr Wayne Graham

Page Number - 159

Despite the efforts of Australian organisations to create inclusive workplaces, women continue to be under-represented in workforce participation and senior leadership roles. Accounting firms are no exception. In this paper, we aim to explore the perceptions of women’s career experiences in senior roles in small and medium sized accounting firms in regional and metropolitan Australia. Thirteen interviews with accountants in regional New South Wales and seventeen interviews with accountants from small and medium sized accounting firms in Sydney were conducted. Results obtained from the exploratory study point to the influence of owner-managers’ gender, firm size and the firm’s geographical location in shaping women’s career experiences. Results also show that, particularly in regional accounting SMEs, gender inequality continues to be reinforced and reproduced by male principals and partners through day-to-day work and social practices constraining women’s aspirations to progress to senior roles. From the interviews, we have identified a suite of ‘best practices’ for enabling women’s career progression that are occurring in some SMEs which, if taken up more widely, may enhance women’s access to more senior roles in accounting SMEs.

Sujana Adapa, Alison Sheridan, Jennifer Rindfleish

Page Number - 178

Weather-related disasters such as floods have become more frequent over the last fifty years in regional communities of Queensland. Between December 2010 and January 2011, three-quarters of Queensland was declared as a disaster zone as a result of flooding. The Central Queensland (CQ) region was severely affected by this flood. To assess potential impacts on property markets, this study examined flood impacts through a case study of Rockhampton within the CQ region by using longitudinal data of the number of quarterly sales and median property price of all three segments of property market (i.e., total house sales, new house and land package sales, and land only sales), before and after the 2011 flood. In addition this study tested changes in the number of sales with a key regional economic impact i.e., mining boom, to test whether the flood impact has been offset by impacts of growth in the mining sector. This study found that flooding has affected the total number of house sales compared to the other two housing submarkets, and also that the flood impact has been relatively offset by the impact of mining

Delwar Akbar, John Rolfe, Garrick Small, Rahat Hossain

Page Number - 160

The ‘Florida hypothesis’ suggests that regional economic growth is driven by inflows of creative workers (the ‘creative class’), and that creative class workers are attracted to regions that are tolerant and diverse. This paper seeks to test the second part of the hypothesis for Australia. Evidence suggests that while there is some association between changes in the creative class and tolerance, the association with diversity is weak and inconsistent. We conclude that overall, the Florida hypothesis does not explain the locational decisions of creatives in the Australian context.

Sveta Angelopoulos, Jonathan Boyma, Ashton de Silva, Jason Potts

Page Number - 202

Using data from the Investment Climate Survey published by the World Bank, this paper estimates the determinants of business level product innovation in Vietnamese enterprises. In particular the paper sheds light on the effect of location on the likelihood of business-level innovation, while also controlling for business-specific factors. The paper also explores the relative importance of the drivers of business innovation across Vietnamese regions. It finds that businesses in the Red River Delta Region, which includes Hanoi, were significantly more likely to introduce new and upgraded products than businesses in other regions. The results suggest that the capital city region had an advantage over other regions for product innovation, challenging popular conceptions of Ho Chi Minh City as the engine of Vietnamese entrepreneurship. The results further suggest that place-based policies may be an important element of successful innovation policy in Vietnam, as they are in developed countries, and that a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to innovation supports is likely to be suboptimal.

Declan Jordan

Page Number - 232

Local government area population projections produced by state and territory governments are regularly subject to criticism for their supposed inaccuracy. This paper examines the 2006 round of such projections for five states, assessing their forecast accuracy after five years. It is demonstrated that, overall, the projections are quite accurate over this five year period relative to both user needs and simple extrapolations which constitute a basic benchmark. It is shown how the error distributions of these projections can be used to create approximate prediction intervals indicating the likely range of error in current local area projections.

Tom Wilson

Page Number - 253