If there is an increasing spatial mismatch between housing and employment, moderately paid workers, essential to the efficient functioning of the urban economy, may face problems in accessing and retaining employment.

Developing a framework to understand how employment growth and commuting patterns (modelled using Journey to Work data) interact to determine the spatial distribution of unemployment in the Statistical Local Areas within the Sydney, this paper is part of an on-going project aimed at understanding the relationship between regional employment growth and unemployment.

Over the last 25 years neighbourhood economic outcomes have become increasingly polarised in Australia. The growing spatial dimensions of this inequality have generated discussion about the existence of ‘neighbourhood effects’, localised externalities and other endogenous processes, leading to underinvestment in education, lower levels of job-creation and economic activity, than might be expected in disadvantaged neighbourhoods.

Ann Harding, Rachel Lloyd, Anthea Bill and Anthony King outlines new techniques used to create synthetic household microdata and demonstrates how they can be used to analyse poverty rates, the spatial impact of possible policy change, and the characteristics of the poor by geographic area.

Investigations into the traditional marine catch of turtle and dugong in the Torres Strait Island Protected Zone (TSPZ) were conducted in 14 communities, over four sample years. Estimated annual catch of dugong were 241 in 1996, 287 in 1998, 692 in 1999, and 619 in 2000/2001. Annual catch of green turtles were 1896, 1097, 1507...