scholarly journals The Daily Commute: An Analysis of the Geography of the Labour Market using 2006 Census Data

Author(s):  
Martin Ralphs ◽  
Rosemary Goodyear

This paper explores the major commuting areas within New Zealand and how commuting patterns have evolved between 1996 and 2006. It focuses primarily on the new insights that mapping and visualisation methods can bring to the analysis and understanding of complex flow data. In particular, we discuss some approaches to delineating labour market areas based on commuter inflow statistics and demonstrate the advantages that spider flow maps bring to the visualisation and understanding of commuting flows between areas. Spider flow maps are based on origin-destination information from the 2006 Census, but the paper also includes an historical perspective, examining changes in, the number and proportion of people commuting between areas and using different modes of transport used for commuting. Although our focus is on the advantages that these new methods can bring to the analysis of commuting data, some interesting findings arise. Both the number of commutes and the distance travelled by commuters has increased markedly since 1996, particularly around the largest cities of the Auckland. Wellington and Christchurch.       Labour markets centered on these cities go well beyond territorial authority boundaries and. particularly in the Auckland case, are becoming increasingly polycentric. Data visucalisation makes the exploration of these patterns much more accessible.

Author(s):  
William Cochrane ◽  
Jacques Poot

Since the early 1990s, the proportion of the New Zealand households living in owner-occupied dwellings has declined markedly from 73.8 per cent in 1991 to 66.9 per cent in 2006. Over the same period there has been a decline in the unemployment rate from 10.5 per cent to 3.5 per cent. Several demand, supply and institutional factors are responsible for the downward trend in unemployment, but this paper investigates a possible connection with homeownership that has hitherto not been investigated in New Zealand. Andrew Oswald argued in a series of unpublished papers in the 1990s that home ownership is detrimental to labour market flexibility because of transaction costs that homeowners must incur when a job change necessitates a change of residence. An extensive theoretical and empirical literature on this hypothesis has emerged internationally. The present paper reviews earlier findings and then rests the hypothesis with 1986, 1991, 1996 and 2001 census data for 58 labour market areas, using econometric models for panel data. We take account of the erogeneity of homeownership. The New Zealand models do provide evidence that supports the Oswald hypothesis.


REGION ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-70
Author(s):  
Liv Osland ◽  
Arnstein Gjestland ◽  
Inge Thorsen

It is well known that measures of labour market accessibility explains spatial variation in housing prices even in markets with polycentric labour market structures. This paper examines whether data on observed commuting patterns can replace or supplement gravity-based measures representing the commuting potential at specific locations. We use data from a region in Western Norway,and we find that measures based on observed commuting flows and commuting time cannot replace a gravity-based measure of labour market accessibility. Based on, inter alia, the spatial Durbin estimator we find that measures of observed commuting flows increase the explanatory power of a hedonic house price model.


Author(s):  
Lucas Martínez-Bernabéu ◽  
José Manuel Casado-Díaz

Labour market areas (LMAs) are a type of functional region (FR) defined on commuting flows and used in many countries to serve as the territorial reference for regional studies and policy making at local levels. Existing methods rely on manual adjustments of the results to ensure high quality, making them difficult to be monitored, hard to apply to different territories, and onerous to produce in terms of required work-hours. We propose an approach to automatise all stages of the delineation procedure and improve the final results, building upon a state-of-the-art stochastic search procedure that ensures optimal allocation of municipalities/counties to LMAs while keeping good global indicators: a pre-processing layer clusters adjoining municipalities with strong commuting flows to constrain the initial search space of the stochastic search, and a multi-criteria heuristic corrects common deficiencies that derive from global maximisation approaches or simple greedy heuristics. It produces high quality LMAs with optimal local characteristics. To demonstrate this methodology and assess the improvement achieved, we apply it to define LMAs in Spain based on the latest commuting data.


Author(s):  
Cristian Barra ◽  
Roberto Zotti

AbstractRegulators should ensure the smooth functioning of the system and promote regional development. Making the health of financial institutions is therefore a prerequisite for a sustainable economic development. This paper contributes to the literature on the relationship between the financial stability and growth within the area of one country. This implies that institutional, legal, and cultural factors are more adequately controlled for and financial markets are more accurately bounded. Using a rich sample of Italian banks over the 2001–2012 period, this paper addresses whether different measures of financial distress affect economic development of labour market areas in Italy. Results show that the financial stability has a positive effect on local economic development, robust to alternative variables capturing financial vulnerability. The presence of spatial effects is tested showing that better financial conditions of the banking system in neighbouring areas have a detrimental effect on an area’s growth.


1998 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 690-715 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joe Isaac

This paper provides an historical perspective on topics related to recent developments in the Australian industrial relations system discussed in this issue of the Journal— the 'living wage' concept and the safety net, 'fairness' in relative wages, women's wages, the Accord, labour market decentralisation and the role of trade unions. It concludes that recent legislation was not necessary to facilitate increased productivity because the prevailing system had shown sufficient responsiveness to the needs of the economy, both macro and micro. By limiting the jurisdiction of the AIRC and reducing the power of the weaker unions, recent legislation bas created a dual system with a less equitable pay structure and an institutional arrangement less able to deal with wage inflation under more buoyant economic conditions.


2021 ◽  
pp. 0308518X2110688
Author(s):  
Yujie Hu

The spatial dimension of the journey-to-work has important implications for land use and development policymaking and has been widely studied. One thrust of this research is concerned with the disaggregation of workers into subgroups for understanding disparities in commute. Most of these studies, however, were limited to the disaggregation by single socioeconomic class. Hence, this research aims to examine commuting disparities across commuter subgroups stratified by two socioeconomic variables—income and race—using a visual analytics approach. By applying the doubly constrained spatial interaction model to the 2014 Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics data, this research first synthesizes commuting flows for Downtown Houston workers across income-race subgroups at the tract level in Harris County, Texas, USA. It then uses bivariate choropleth mapping to visualize the spatial distributions of major Downtown Houston commuter neighborhoods by income-race classes, and significant commuting disparities are identified across income-race subgroups. The results highlight the importance of considering income and race simultaneously for commuting research. The visualization could help policymakers clearly identify the unequal commute across worker subgroups and inform policymaking.


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