SOCIO-ECONOMIC PERFORMANCE ACROSS AUSTRALIA'S NON-METROPOLITAN FUNCTIONAL ECONOMIC REGIONS

There has been a significant amount of work published which aims to understand the socio-economic performance of Australia's non-metropolitan regions, cities and towns. Significantly much of this work has illustrated the variation in outcomes that characterise different places as they adjust to new and evolving social, economic, demographic and environmental realities. This existing research often focuses on spatial boundaries (regions, cities or towns) that are created for administrative reasons. While this is useful, it is also important to understand the social, economic and other processes as they are occurring in places that make up functional social or economic regions. Addressing the socio-economic outcomes of such functional regions is the focus of this paper. It utilises newly derived functional economic regions for non-metropolitan Australia and census data for 2006 to undertake a multivariate analysis which explores the variation in socio-economic outcomes across these new regions. Importantly, this analysis provides a new understanding of the varied outcomes that characterise Australia's non-metropolitan regions.