This paper explores the rural urbanisation process, infrastructure status (physical, social, and agricultural), and development of rural nonagricultural activities in West Bengal, India. The study examines how new urban growth relates to infrastructure deconcentration and how rural infrastructure contributes to the expansion of non-farm activities. Key findings indicate a Kolkata metropolitan-centric urbanisation pattern, with neighbouring districts like Howrah, Hooghly, and North 24-Parganas showing high urban growth, while rural areas experience low urbanisation. The state has witnessed a surge in the number of census towns, accompanied by uneven infrastructure development across districts. Rural enterprises in West Bengal remain largely informal, with limited employment capacity. Districts with better infrastructure, such as Bardhaman, Howrah and Hooghly, have higher percentages of non-agricultural enterprises employing hired workers, reinforcing the link between infrastructure and nonagricultural activity growth. Policy recommendations include targeted investments in infrastructure to support rural non-farm activities and local employment creation, especially in districts with lagging infrastructure.
The size of grain harvests are increasing in most Australian states, enabling farmers to supply increasing volumes of grain to domestic and international customers. There is a market preference to supply international customers in the months prior to the availability of the northern hemisphere grain harvest that commences from June. To expedite export sales of Australian grain, most owners and operators of regional export grain supply chains in Australia are increasing their investments in the velocity, reliability, and capacity of their export grain supply chains. Larger volumes of Australian grain are now more rapidly exported. But what are the ramifications of these investments? Drawing on historical datasets of regional grain production, domestic grain consumption, and grain exports in each Australian state, this paper explores the national and state impacts of the enhanced investments in Australia's export grain supply chains. The implications for Australian farmers, domestic consumers of grains, and owners of grain supply chain infrastructure are discussed. Farmers benefit from the enhanced capacity and velocity of grain flows in Australia's grain supply chains, but in some eastern states in particular years, food price inflation may be triggered whenever more grain more quickly leaves Australia's shores prior to a severe emerging drought that constrains future local grain supplies and places upward pressure on local grain prices. In periods of prolonged drought, concerns about domestic food price inflation may lead to social and political pressure for changes to grain export and grain import policies and additional investments to facilitate interstate grain flows.
Peripheral, staples-based regions around the world are often subjected to disempowering "development" processes by international, national, and subnational forces. The remote regions of northern Australia are some of the most marginalised regions in Australia, despite holding critical mineral and energy resources, major defence establishments and vital transport links. Using a mixed methodology of economic analysis, document review and semi-structured interviews, this paper examines economic development planning for the Katherine region of the Northern Territory of Australia from 2014 to 2021 and contrasts this with a place-based development approach. Ostensibly building on the region's comparative advantages, formal economic strategies developed at the Federal and Territory scale are focused primarily on industries and projects that increase revenue for higher levels of government and large corporations, rather than creating local employment. These plans are unlikely to diversify the economic structure of the Katherine region and lead to truly sustainable development.
This study examines output divergence and club convergence across 63 provinces in Vietnam during the period 2010-2023. The study found that the provincial level of real gross domestic product (GDP) per capita diverged over the study period. However, all 63 provinces could be grouped into six convergence clubs. This study also employs Geographic Information System (GIS) techniques to examine whether high-performing provinces are geographically concentrated around Vietnam's economic centres. In further insights into the six convergence clubs using analytical techniques, we found that the convergence Club 1 includes 21 provinces with the highest per capita real GDP, total investment, and foreign direct investment (FDI), which contrasts with the provinces of the remaining Clubs 2-6. Based on our findings, three policies are recommended to reduce income inequality across the provinces of Vietnam.
Residential land values and housing prices across regional Australia have outpaced those of capital cities over the past five years, primarily driven by forces of market demand. This paper commences with a review of the movement in land values and examines the key factors that have driven demand for residential land and housing in regional New South Wales (NSW). By reviewing submissions to the NSW Regional Housing Taskforce 2022, the paper explores the feedback and factors that have impacted, and will continue to impact, land values and housing demand in the medium term. Through thematic analysis, this paper finds a shift towards lifestyle living and second dwelling ownership and a change in workforce demand have increased the demand for regional housing. This is compounded by the demand for short-term worker accommodation and the conversion of long-term rentals into short-term stays. These factors have profoundly increased demand for housing and residential land values across regional NSW.
The surge in house prices, post COVID, presented a tremendous challenge to the Government in Australia. Enhancing purchase affordability, especially for new entrants of the housing market, that is the first home buyers, is the top priority for the current government. Several housing programmes have been proposed which aim to target and help low-and moderate-income families into homeownership. This paper analyses features of two of these programmes, namely "First home guarantee scheme" (FHGS) and "Help to buy scheme" (HTBS). Using Queensland as a case study, a housing microsimulation model is used to conduct a comparative analysis of these two programmes. The impact of these two programmes has been evaluated on the basis of their impact on the number of potential first-time buyers who can achieve home ownership. Results suggest that the FHGS can be more helpful in increasing rates of homeownership than the HTBS.
This study measures the efficiency of health expenditures in improving child mortality outcomes, one of the targets of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). Bootstrap data envelopment analysis was used to evaluate the efficiency of 127 low-and middle-income countries (LMICs) from 2010 to 2019. We found that 45 percent of the LMICs operated at decreasing returns to scale (DRS), implying that an increase in inputs could generate only a smaller increase in health outcomes, whereas 53 percent exhibited increasing returns to scale, indicating that an increase in health expenditure could lead to a greater increase in health outcomes. The findings of the study also have greater policy implications. It suggests that countries which perform at DRS could deliberate on reallocating resources to improve their health outcomes since these countries may not benefit from an increase in the input level as their output will not increase at the same rate. Therefore, governments should focus on improving efficiency rather than increasing health expenditure, thereby enabling the achievement of the SDG target.
How has COVID-19 impacted on the financial services sector? This paper attempts to answer the question by investigating the sector revenues across the four regions in the U.S. My findings show that there are negative impacts of COVID-19 on the sector revenues. Specifically, regions with a larger financial services sector are more likely to be affected by the pandemic. To rebuild more resilient financial systems, it is imperative to understand the key factors contributing to the differences of negative impacts on those regions. By employing multiple discriminant analysis (MDA), the results indicate that before COVID-19, labour determined revenue differences across regions, while during the pandemic, local, state, and federal taxes played the key roles. My findings and discussions aim to inform policy makers in decision-making processes during this outbreak.
As in other countries, the incidence of COVID-19 and its infection rate is not the same in every area in Indonesia. In addition, the different local conditions and situations mean the policy action items often need to be adapted to these factors. This study aims to understand the impact of COVID-19 on Eastern Indonesia's economy compared to other places in Indonesia and the contribution of their governments at provincial and district levels in terms of COVID-19 prevention and economic recovery effort. This study shows that remoteness has not excluded Eastern Indonesia from COVID-19 infection. Despite less requirement for the community to stay home, the mobility data shows that other activities such as retail, recreation, grocery shopping and park use still went down as much as in other parts of Indonesia. However, activities in workplaces dropped considerably less and allowed the economies in Eastern Indonesia to grow better than other areas during the pandemic.
Evidence from countries around the world suggests that rural-urban wage gaps are not solely explained by skill differences. Using data for Australia, the current study reaches the same conclusion; there is positive relationship between local economy size and local wages. Workers in Australian large urban centres earn around 7.5% more than workers with similar skill levels in rural areas. Urban Australians do not experience higher wage growth than rural Australians. Therefore, high wage growth in the year following rural-urban migration is most likely explained by the migrant taking jobs that below his ability upon arrival.
Uncertain post-pandemic population trends raise an interesting dilemma for regional governance authorities. Population stagnation afflicting non- metropolitan regions had been a familiar feature of Australian history. In recognition of its serious social and economic effects, population retention and growth have been familiar elements within the development strategies promulgated by regional governance authorities. Such was the case for South Australia's Limestone Coast region. Unexpectedly, the coronavirus pandemic became associated with more favourable population-movement trends for many regions, including the Limestone Coast. In that region, there is an emerging sense that future strategic challenges may centre on the housing and infrastructure implications of a growing population rather than on the problem of a stagnant population. The strategic response of the region's governance authorities is hampered by the uncertainty about whether the more favourable population trends will turn out to be a temporary or a more enduring phenomenon.
The novel Coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has caused unprecedented global devastation across various sectors. This study employs a five-compartmental deterministic mathematical model to analyse the transmission dynamics of this highly contagious disease in Bangladesh. To understand and control the system's dynamics in our model, we investigated the basic reproduction number, solution existence, equilibrium states stability analysis, sensitivity analysis, and behavioural dynamics of COVID-19 through numerical simulations. We also evaluated the influence of progression and recovery rates on the COVID-19 dynamics in Bangladesh. Further, the model identifies significant parameters from Bangladesh's COVID-19 data. The findings in this study aid in quantifying diverse parameters to assess the disease severity and formulate effective control strategies, thereby accelerating the containment of the virus spread in Bangladesh.
This paper focuses on the spatial variation in the uptake of social security benefits following a large and detrimental exogenous shock. Specifically, we focus on the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. We construct a two-period panel of 66 Territorial Authorities (TAs) of New Zealand (NZ) observed in 2008-09 and 2020-21. We find that, despite the totally different nature of the two shocks, the initial increase in benefit uptake due to the COVID-19 pandemic was of a similar magnitude as that of the GFC, and the spatial pattern was also quite similar. We link the social security data with 146 indicator variables across 15 domains that were obtained from population censuses that were held two years before each of the two periods. To identify urban characteristics that point to economic resilience, we formulate spatial panel regression models. Additionally, we use machine learning techniques. We find that the most resilient TAs had two years previously: (1) a low unemployment rate; and (2) a large public sector. Additionally, but with less predictive power, we find that TAs had a smaller increase in social security uptake after the shock when they had previously: (3) a high employment rate (or high female labour force participation rate); (4) a smaller proportion of the population stating ethnicities other than NZ European; (5) a smaller proportion of the population living in more deprived area units. We also find that interregional spillovers matter and that resilient regions cluster.
The COVID-19 pandemic impacted the pharmaceutical supply chain (PSC) globally. As a result, consumers, pharmaceutical industries, and retailers have been facing supply chain disruptions since 2020. This paper aims to identify the causes and effects of PSC disruptions through a scoping review and propose an analytical framework for further study in Australia and overseas. This scoping review was performed according to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. Based on inclusion/exclusion criteria, 47 full articles were included in this review. Studies show significant disruptions to PSC where important contributing factors include: (i) reduction in product supply due to production disruptions and border closures, (ii) increased demand for healthcare products and, (iii) changes in consumers' purchasing behaviour. The study developed an analytical framework that can systematically be used to map PSC disruption in regional settings in Australia and overseas.
Many free-trade agreements have contributed to abolishing and reducing tariffs across countries; however, concerns regarding trade promotion have shifted from tariff to non-tariff measures (NTMs). This study focuses on sanitary and phytosanitary measures (SPS) and technical barriers to trade (TBT) as NTMs. The literature suggests that the effects of SPS and TBT are likely to be negative; however, some evidence of positive effects has also been found. This empirical study examines the impact of SPS and TBT on agri-food trade in the Asia-Pacific region. The estimation results indicate that SPS and TBT become non-tariff barriers in several agri-food trades in the Asia-Pacific region. In contrast, the results for some commodities appear to suggest that, for these commodities, more transparency encourages trade despite greater bilateral divergence of rules and regulations.
Dairy has been a major food commodity in Australia since 1788 and a core export commodity since the 1930s, with rapid growth in the 1980s and a rapid decline in 2000 with the introduction of the dairy deregulation policy. The high rate of decline of dairy farms within Australia, particularly in New South Wales (NSW) and Queensland, has left the industry and market unprepared for future development. One reason for this decline would be the domestic supply and demand mismatch. Therefore, this study examines the relationship between supply (i.e., whole milk production), market demand (domestic and international markets) and policy variables. This study collected supply and demand-related data between 1980 and 2021 and then used a multiple regression model to depict the relationship between supply and demand variables. The study found that while there is a significant relationship between total whole milk production and domestic demand, there is relationship between supply, deregulation, and export market has not been identified. Therefore, the Australian dairy industry should look at how do they increase their volume in the export market without reducing the supply to the domestic market.
With the development of the metropolitan real estate market in recent years, there has been a trend of residents spilling out of the metropolis, especially in the wake of COVID-19. Housing prices in the regional areas have increased. The factors that cause the spillover are unclear. This paper aimed to excavate the potential factors that make households move away from metropolitan areas to regional areas through a literature review. Literature was searched in Google Scholar using selected keywords. The spillover effect was assessed by considering the economic, geographic, demographic and social characteristics. Understanding the factors of the spillover effect is conducive to real estate valuation, provides informed information for governments formulating regional planning and land policies, advises developers to compose commercial strategy, and helps buyers to make choices.
Extreme weather events are anticipated to become more common around the world and they impact yield volatility i.e. reduce food production. Given the changing nature of the world's climate, and the disproportionate effect this might have on developing countries such as Bangladesh, this is an important topic to study. Agriculture is the major employment source and a significant economic contributing sector in Bangladesh. Moreover, extreme rainfall has a significant effect on agricultural production, which negatively affects the nation's food security and may make it more difficult to end hunger and achieve United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 2. Therefore, understanding and modelling the extremes of rainfall in Bangladesh is crucial. This study considers extreme rainfall in different regional domains of Bangladesh and estimates predictive return levels using the Generalized Extreme Value (GEV) and Generalized Pareto Distribution (GPD) in the Bayesian setting. Finally, a comparative study is carried out among return levels at regional areas determined by the distributions considered here. Results depict that in the case of the GEV, once every 100 years, on average, we can expect daily rainfall levels to exceed 400 mm in some locations. However, in the case of the GPD, once every 50 years, on average, we can expect daily rainfall levels to exceed 800 mm in Dinajpur and Mymensingh regions. More rainfall will be observed in Chattogram, Cox's Bazar, Dinajpur, Faridpur, Khulna, and Mymensingh regions compared to other parts of Bangladesh. It is also observed that the 100-year return levels are closer to the lower bound than the upper bound of the credible intervals. This information may also be used to identify regions that are particularly vulnerable to the kind of heavy rain that causes flooding.
In this paper we introduce a measure of cultural diversity that takes ‘social difference’ between country of birth and ethnic groups into account. We measure social difference using exploratory factor analysis of subjective identity, attitude and value responses in Aotearoa New Zealand’s 2016 General Social Survey. We examine the level of, and change in, our social difference-based measure of cultural diversity in 31 urban areas between 1976 and 2018, using census data. We compare these patterns with those derived from a standard fractionalisation measure of diversity based on population composition by country of birth and ethnicity. We find that the two diversity measures are highly correlated across the urban areas. Diversity increased everywhere between 1976 and 2018, whether social difference is taken into account or not. However, the social difference-based measure increased much faster than the standard measure in all but one of the urban areas. This suggests that growth in the fractionalisation measure of diversity is likely to have underestimated the trend in experienced social difference. Both measures also show evidence of spatial convergence in diversity: urban areas with low diversity in 1976 – which tended to be in the South Island – exhibited faster increases. Population diversity increased strikingly in Queenstown, which was the 19th most diverse urban area in 1976, in terms of social difference, but second only to Auckland in 2018.
