Issue 2

Although the aviation industry is an integral component of regional economic development, aircraft noise complaints have become an increasingly contentious issue. This raises the significant question of how airports can better position themselves as socially responsible drivers of regional economic development. This study examines airport-regional community relations in one of the fastest growing airports in Australia—the Gold Coast Airport. The contributions of this paper are two-fold. First, it demonstrates the analysis of social barometers such as media reports and community attributes that can generate useful insights for airport management. Second, it highlights the need for proactive airport social responsibility measures to address the issue of aircraft-noise in a regional setting.

Subas Prasad Dhakal, Muhammad Nateque Mahmood, Kerry Brown and Robyn Keast

Page Number - 107

The persistence of differential labour market outcomes has led to the recognition that labour mobility may be influenced by both labour market variables and non-pecuniary factors such as amenity and quality of life. Using regional-level panel data and a fixed-effects estimation procedure, we examine the relationship between labour mobility decisions and unemployment levels, amenity, as well as variables related to previous migration experience, location, the mining boom and the presence of a program designed to encourage labour mobility to regional areas. We find that labour market factors influence mobility decisions, but that these are moderated by amenity, and that mobility is also influenced by anthropocentric amenity. The findings with respect to anthropocentric amenity as well as the program designed to encourage regional relocation provide evidence of the potential effectiveness of government policies designed to overcome labour market impediments.

Paul Forbes, John Hicks, Mark Morrison and Kishor Sharma

Page Number - 164

The economy of Queensland, Australia is dependent on coal exports for economic growth, the buoyancy of the state budget and employment in regional areas with limited alternative economic opportunities. Queensland policy-makers need to address the risks associated with dependence on a commodity which has an uncertain future. This article considers the history of Australia’s vulnerability to global transitions, current trends associated with a global energy transition, and suggests a strategy to mitigate against the multiple risks associated with a reliance on the export of coal by Regional Queensland.

Lynette Molyneaux and John Foster

Page Number - 132

It is well known from the literature on regional business cycles in Australia that there are significant differences between the time-paths of economic activity of the Australian states. These differences must result from either differences in the response of the state economies to a common national shock and/or their response to state-specific shocks. The way in which a regional economy reacts to a national shock is closely related to the notion of regional economic resilience, a concept that has gained considerable popularity in the regional economics literature of the past decade or so. It has become common in that literature to distinguish between engineering resilience (the ability of a regional economy to return to the original equilibrium following a negative shock) and ecological resilience (the convergence of regional economies to new equilibria). The economic resilience of the Australian states is the focus of the research reported in this paper.
We analyse resilience within a vector-autoregressive (VAR)/vector-error-correction (VEC) model using monthly employment data for the states and the nation as a whole from the 2nd quarter 1978 to 1st quarter 2019. We find that employment growth rates are stationary so that, in terms of growth rates, the state economies are resilient in the engineering sense, although they may revert to equilibrium at different rates. The (log) levels of employment, however, are non-stationary but cointegrated, suggesting ecological resilience in employment levels since cointegration implies that the cointegrated variables return to (likely new) equilibria following a shock. We use a VEC model to identify a national shock, generate responses of the state employment levels to this shock and compare the resulting time-paths (the impulse response functions) to assess relative resilience. We find that Western Australia is the least sensitive of the states to a national shock and so the most resilient, while the economies of Tasmania and Victoria are the most sensitive to an adverse national shock and so the least resilient. The responses of the other states are all quite close to the national average response, indicating little difference in the resilience of New South Wales, Queensland and South Australia.

Nicolaas Groenewold

Page Number - 186