- Title
- An analysis of the new ABS statistical geography
- Creator
- Flanagan, Michael
- Relation
- University of Newcastle Research Higher Degree Thesis
- Resource Type
- thesis
- Date
- 2015
- Description
- Masters Research - Masters of Philosophy (MPhil)
- Description
- The 2011 Census saw the introduction of a new statistical geography for Australia. Labour markets were a key consideration in the design of the new spatial unit, Statistical Area Level 4s (SA4s), despite the imposition of certain population and cross-border constraints. The SA4s are used to disseminate official labour market statistics gathered from the monthly Labour Force Survey. The thesis tests the efficacy of the SA4s against alternative regionalisations derived using commuting data employed in grouping algorithms that have been used to define areal groupings, an amended version of the Coombes algorithm and the Intramax algorithm. Fuzzy set principles are used to guide a fine-tuning procedure of the groupings based on self-containment and interaction of the commuting flows. Fuzzy set principles are also the basis for some of the summary statistics that are used to test the various regionalisations. The labour market coherence of the areas comprising regions are compared using an analysis of variance of economic indicators as well as spatial autocorrelation and association measures. It is found that the SA4 regionalisation performs reasonably well against the functional alternatives. All regionalisations exhibit spatial autocorrelation for the economic indicators with just a few exceptions but it is argued that this is inevitable given the constraints. Relaxing the cross-border constraint consistently improves the results for the SA4s. With the focus on the efficacy of regions as labour markets in terms of the self-containment and interaction of commuting, it is concluded the TTWA algorithm provides the best delineation, which are characterised by large regions that form incorporating the CBD of the capital cities, capped by the population constraint.
- Subject
- functional regions; TTWA algorithm; intramax; fuzzy set methodology; spatial autocorrelation
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1305734
- Identifier
- uon:21092
- Rights
- Copyright 2015 Michael Flanagan
- Language
- eng
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| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT02 | Thesis | 3 MB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download |