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Measuring Community Economic Resilience in Australia: Estimates of Recent Levels and Trends

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Abstract

We measure changes in community economic resilience (CER) across geo-locations in Australia between 2006 and 2011, a time span characterised by major natural and economic shocks. We build an index of potential CER that captures communities’ stocks of human, social, natural, physical and financial capitals, levels of economic diversity and accessibility to service centres. Using Census data and the ARIA index, we resort to principal component analysis to generate CER indexes at statistical area level 1, which is our community proxy. Our analysis of index values provides a number of useful insights. First, there was a statistically significant improvement over time in the overall CER index in all states and regions. Second, our CER measures improved at a different pace across regions and states while their rank remained mostly unchanged. Third, CER improved over time in social and physical capital and accessibility terms, but declined in human, natural, financial capital and diversity terms. Fourth, communities with a high economic diversity level reported higher capital stock except for natural capital, and communities with a low accessibility level had lower capital stock except for social and natural capital. Finally, CER has a long-term positive association with household income.

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Notes

  1. Australia consists of six states: New South Wales (NSW), Victoria (VIC), Queensland (QLD), Western Australia (WA), South Australia (SA) and Tasmania (TAS), and two territories: The Australian Capital Territory (ACT) and the Northern Territory (NT). The MDB region straddles NSW, VIC, QLD, SA and the ACT.

  2. An SA1 is designed to contain (or aggregate to) whole gazetted suburbs or rural localities. In urban areas, the gazetted suburbs usually consist of one or more SA1 s. SA1 s provide a closed boundary to small rural towns with a population of 180 persons or more (ABS Catalogue No. 1270.0.55.001).

  3. A full table of mean construct-specific indexes of community economic resilience across regions and over time is available from the authors upon request. The table also contains the changing ranks of states and regions over time and the number of SA1 communities for each state, territory or region.

  4. The contribution of each component to total change in the composite CER is calculated using the formula: \(\frac{{(C_{i}^{2011} - C_{i}^{2006} )}}{{\mathop \sum \nolimits_{i = 1}^{7} (C_{i}^{2011} - C_{i}^{2006} )}}*100\,\%\) where \(C_{i}^{2006}\, {\text{and}}\, C_{i}^{2011}\) are the values of component i in year 2006 and 2011 respectively.

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Acknowledgments

The paper was fully supported by the Murray-Darling Basin Futures Research and is supported through the Australian Government’s Collaborative Research Networks (CRN) Program. We would like to thank David Flemming for constructive comments and suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Business, Government and Law, University of Canberra, Canberra, ACT, 2617, Australia

    Huong Dinh, Ben Freyens & Anne Daly

  2. National Centre for Social Economic Modelling, University of Canberra, Canberra, ACT, 2617, Australia

    Yogi Vidyattama

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  1. Huong Dinh
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Correspondence to Huong Dinh.

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Dinh, H., Freyens, B., Daly, A. et al. Measuring Community Economic Resilience in Australia: Estimates of Recent Levels and Trends. Soc Indic Res 132, 1217–1236 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-016-1337-y

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