Why Do Disparities in Employment Growth Across Metropolitan and Regional Space Occur?
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Working Paper No. 03-09 Why do disparities in employment growth across metropolitan and regional space occur? William Mitchell and Ellen Carlson1 November 2003 [revised December 2003] Centre of Full Employment and Equity The University of Newcastle, Callaghan NSW 2308, Australia Home Page: http://e1.newcastle.edu.au/coffee Email: [email protected] 1. Introduction Over the last few decades there has been considerable change in the industrial and demographic composition of employment with substantial impacts on the spatial economy. There are significant disparities in employment growth rates across metropolitan and regional areas of Australia. These disparities are intrinsically linked to the persistence of unemployment rate differentials across the same spatial units and accompanying social disadvantage (Mitchell and Carlson, 2003). The capital cities typically fare better in terms of lower unemployment rates and higher employment growth and appear to be able to recover from recession more easily. Demarcating the regions into Capital City and Rest of State with the Territories as single regions (based on ABS Labour Force categories) and employing an array of statistical techniques (multiple regression, contingency table analysis, causality analysis, vector autoregression, and cointegration analysis), Mitchell and Carlson (2003) examined the relative significance of national factors and region-specific factors in explaining these disparities. They concluded that a region’s unemployment ranking is negatively influenced by its employment growth and this, in turn, is significantly influenced by aggregate (national) fluctuations. However, region-specific fluctuations were also found to be important. Mitchell and Carlson (2003) grouped the regions into high growth (both regions in WA and QLD, NT, ACT - see Appendix for regional mnemonics), moderate growth (both regions in VIC and NSW) and low growth (both regions in TAS and SA) in terms of employment outcomes. The spatial diversity of response to aggregate fluctuations and region-specific dynamics was notable with high growth regions able to resist negative impacts from national contractions more effectively than other regions. Low growth regions have stagnant labour markets and negative shocks appear to endure for long periods. The disaggregated data set used was a development on previous studies of regional unemployment, where States and Territories have defined the regional unit (for example, Dixon and Shepherd, 2001). This research bears directly on the regional economic debate concerning the relative importance of regional-specific versus macroeconomic factors in determining regional employment outcomes. The theoretical impasse is also evident in regional development policy (Rissman, 1999). Keynesian macroeconomics typically argues that regional employment variations are caused by the national business cycle impacting on growth rates across industries and reflect changes in aggregate factors, such as fiscal and monetary policy settings, business and consumer confidence and productivity trends. Thus, the cyclical sensitivity of regional outcomes reflects the impact of common aggregate shocks on a specific regional industry mix. Regions dominated by goods-production allegedly lose employment share in recessions relative to service-providing regions. The solution is for aggregate policy to maintain strong growth with industry policy attenuating structural shifts. The current Australian Government has pursued a different interpretation of the ‘macro’ view and has eschewed both stimulatory macro policy and specific regional policy. Its low-inflation policy with fiscal restraint is designed to create a macro environment within which economic growth will flourish. Supplementary microeconomic labour market and welfare reforms aim to provide market incentives to promote individual participation in economic activity. Rather than introduce regionally-targetted policies, this strategy places faith in market forces to redress the 2 regional problems - through labour mobility away from and firm relocation into areas of low labour utilisation response to falling wages and improved local labour skills. While the national economy has demonstrated consistent output growth over the last decade, the regional disparities in labour market outcomes persist. The tight macro policy has sustained high unemployment and mobility patterns and relative wage movements have not promoted regional convergence (Martin, 1997; Debelle and Vickery, 1999). Disparities in regional incomes and employment are persistent and in many cases increasing (ALGA, 2002). For such reasons, the ‘macro’ view (irrespective of the guise it takes) is now under challenge. There is also growing anecdotal evidence that regional development agencies are adopting a paradigm that has been termed ‘new regionalism’, which emerged in the mid-1980s and was inspired by case studies documenting economic successes in regions such as Silicon Valley and Baden Württemberg. Scott and Storper (1989) posited that regions had displaced nation states as sites of successful economic organisation and the emphasis should be on localised institutions and collaborations. Accordingly, the status of macroeconomic policy is considered peripheral to a particular region’s growth potential (Castells and Hall, 1994; Cooke and Morgan, 1998). Despite the growing popularity of new regionalism, the claim that the region offers a convincing theoretical explanation of recent and future economic development is under-researched and has weak empirical underpinnings. There is little known about how the national economy and its regions interact. Further, no empirical evidence exists to verify assumptions of, first, the emergence of capitalism centred on spatialised, autonomous economies, and, second, a hollowed out, macro- weakened nation state (Lovering, 1999; Markusen, 1996). In this paper we extend Mitchell and Carlson (2003) to develop a better understanding of the disparities in employment growth across regions which appear to account for observed persistence in regional unemployment disparities. There is very little research on this issue in Australia. The paper also seeks to determine whether metropolitan areas have benefited from favourable industry locations relative to ‘de- industrialised’ regional areas. Using dynamic shift-share analysis (Arcelus, 1984; Barff and Knight, 1988) we decompose regional employment growth into a national growth component, an industry mix component and a regional growth component and examine industry level data by full-time and part-time employment to relate these shares to observed employment growth differentials between metropolitan and regional labour markets. We also examine the regional impact of the increasing significance of part-time work in overall employment creation in Australia by decomposing employment dynamics into part-time and full-time components which helps us explore the spatial disparities more closely. 2. Data issues The typical unit of analysis for Australian regional studies, particularly in cross- national studies, has been the State/Territory (see Dixon and Shepherd, 2001). However more detailed regional labour force data is available for 64 Major Statistical Regions collected through the Australian Labour Force Survey. To focus attention on industry employment movements the lowest disaggregation available is at capital city (metropolitan)/rest of state level. Accordingly, we define the regions by capital city (metropolitan) (denoted _C) and rest of State (denoted _R) with the ACT and NT treated as complete regions. The data are available from 1978 for standard labour 3 force categories and from 1985 for detailed employment data for the 17 ANZSIC industries (see Appendix for description of ANZSIC classification). The latter data are available for full-time, part-time and total employment by industry by region. Using quarterly data, regional employment growth is defined as: (1) gEErrtrt=100*log( /−4 ) where Ert is employment at time t in region r. Similarly, annual national employment growth is defined as: (2) gEEntt=100*log( /−4 ) where Et is total national (n) employment at time t. Net regional employment growth net is defined as grrtnt=−gg and indicates a region’s changing share in total employment. For the dynamic shift-share analysis in Section 5, annual industry employment data by region was used. Thus national employment growth is defined as: (3) gnttt=−(EE−−11) / E The growth in employment in industry i at national level is defined as: (4) gin=−(EE it it−−11) / E it Finally, employment growth rate for industry i in region r is defined as: (5) gir=−()EE irt irt−−11/ E irt 3. Regional distribution of unemployment 3.1 Regional unemployment rankings Dixon and Shepherd (2001) examine quarterly unemployment rates for six Australian states and two territories from 1978:Q2 to 1999:Q1 and find no evidence of common trends between regions but do identify common cycles among larger states with TAS and the Territories appearing to be disconnected. Their results suggest there is no tendency towards convergence in ‘regional’ unemployment rates even though, generally, they are all influenced by broader cyclical forces. This contrasts with Debelle and Vickrey (1999: 262) who find “evidence of permanent (or at least very persistent) differences between state unemployment rates” and consider state unemployment rates to be “largely explained by national (aggregate) factors rather than region-specific factors” (Dixon