Employment

Melbourne-based firm .id (informed decisions) have just launched economy.id, an online economic profile to “describe, explore and promote” local economies.

economy.id joins the .id stable of profiles and other web-based programs, including profile.id, atlas.id, forecast.id and housing.id. .id’s main client base is local government, with over 180 councils and regional organisations of councils across Australia using one or more .id product. However the beneficiaries of economy.id and the company’s other products are not just councillors and local government staff, as most councils also make these products available online for local residents, businesses, community organisations and others to use (click here for an overview of .id’s products).

economy.id (which so far can be viewed for Penrith City Council in NSW, the City of Monash in Victoria and the City of Joondalup in WA) has a deceptively simple structure. It sets out to answer questions in two key sections called “our economy”, focused on economic characteristics and performance and “our resources”, which concentrates on profiling the resident workforce as well as the labour force and key local infrastructure.

The questions include, for example, “what is the size of the local economy?”, “how is the local economy performing?” and “what are the local labour force characteristics?”. These questions economy.id attempts to answer through a series of accessible tables, graphs and thematic maps – and whilst the focus is on the local, most tables and graphs provide comparisons to relevant metropolitan and state level benchmarks.

Like the company’s other products, economy.id is hosted on the .id server, but councils and other clients can customise the profile’s appearance, incorporating their logos and linking it to their own websites. This approach is consistent with .id’s other products and the company has largely succeeded in maintaining a similar look and feel.

This belies the complexity involved in putting together a local economic profile, which has required the integration of a wide variety of data, including information from the census, national accounts, and other ABS data sources, DEEWR small area labour markets data and input-output modelling from REMPLAN. The latter is particularly significant for councils, providing accessible input-output modelling at the local level.

All this means that economy.id moves well beyond the parameters of .id’s “flagship” product, profile.id, which is mainly based on census data. Not surprisingly the costs are also higher, with an up-front charge of $35,000 and an annual fee of $7,500, the latter covering hosting the profile, regular updating as new data becomes available and a comprehensive training program. However, as a council staffer pointed out at the NSW launch, economy.id has the potential to deliver significant savings to councils in financial and staff resources.

Until now, councils interested in researching and analysing local economic performance have had to commission either academic researchers or private consultancy firms, usually on a one-off basis. Invariably this approach is very expensive and whilst the results can be and often are of a high standard, this has not always been the case. In addition the data produced has usually been static in nature and difficult to update, with limited community access, especially online.

economy.id succeeds in addressing these issues. It also provides a more consistent and higher standard of economic data available for use within council (ensuring, for example, that all reports to council use the same economic parameters and even the same graphs and tables) and in promoting the local area for investment. This information will also put councils in a much better position when negotiating with state government, federal government and the private sector.

This is not to say that economy.id is perfect. Ideally, some modules such as local infrastructure will be fleshed out with more material in future. In addition, the issues noted in the supporting information regarding data sources and quality need to be considered carefully. Whilst economy.id may not meet everyone’s requirements for local economic analysis but it will go a long way by providing a baseline of the best available and up-to-date economic data in a consistent and accessible format.

Whilst councils need to decide whether this product will meet their local needs (and, as with all web-based products, should always assess the relevant Web 2.0 risk factors discussed here), economy.id has the potential to provide great value for money. It will allow councils and others using economic information to redirect their resources away from basic number-crunching, formatting and presentation to more strategic analysis of the results.

Ultimately it will also provide a great local community resource. Local communities, businesses and organisations may well be the major beneficiaries, especially if enough councils across the country or even within a particular region adopt economy.id as their standard for local economic profiling and make it publicly available through their websites.

Disclaimer: whilst the author has no current relationship with .id, he was once involved in commissioning the company to prepare a regional profile based on the 2006 census.

In my last post I looked at the snapshot of Sydney’s 33 largest employment centres provided by the NSW Transport Data Centre (TDC) in its Employment and Commuting in Sydney’s Centres, 1996 – 2006, based on the Metropolitan Strategy centres hierarchy. The TDC report also discussed employment growth in the period 1996 to 2006, which is the topic of this post (note: the qualifications about the data I mentioned in my previous post also apply to the statistics below).

The report shows 71,350 new jobs were created in Sydney between 2001 and 2006, with 26,600 (37%) of these jobs in centres. There was a growth rate of 4% for both employment centres and the Sydney statistical division (SD) generally. However, employment grew much faster between 1996 and 2001, when it increased in centres grew by 13% and across the Sydney SD by 9%.

As I said earlier, whilst the TDC report is a great metro-wide overview, digging deeper on a regional basis provides another perspective. To do this I restructured the graph in the TDC report showing centres growth in the 1996 to 2001 and 2001 to 2006 periods into two graphs for eastern and Western Sydney (graphs 1 and 2) and a summary table for the period 2001 to 2006 (table 1). This affirms the extent to which growth rates slowed in 2001 to 2006 across both regions, but also reveals that there was considerable variation between eastern and Western Sydney.

Graph 1:

Graph 2:

TABLE 1: SYDNEY EMPLOYMENT GROWTH BY REGION SUMMARY, 2001-2006

Source: based on NSW Transport Data Centre data

* Eastern Sydney – all Sydney LGAs outside Greater Western Sydney

** Western Sydney – the 14 LGAs comprising Greater Western Sydney

In both regions and most centres there was strong growth between 1996 and 2001. However in 2001 to 2006 the pattern diverged. In eastern Sydney the CBD grew by over 5% and centres such as Ultimo/Pyrmont, Macquarie Park, Rhodes, Randwick and Sydney Airport also experienced considerable growth. Meanwhile other areas such as Surry Hills/Kings Cross, St Leonards/Crows Nest and South Sydney lost jobs. Overall, centre-based employment grew by only 1.8% and growth was higher outside the centres than within them in eastern Sydney.

The story in Western Sydney was quite different. Employment growth across GWS centres in the period 2001 to 2006 of 12.5% was much stronger than the average in eastern Sydney centres and stronger than employment growth overall in the Sydney SD. It was also stronger than in areas outside the main employment centres.

This growth was also more widely spread across the key centres. Only Wetherill Park showed a significant loss, although Bankstown decreased marginally. Norwest, Eastern Creek, Castle Hill, Olympic Park, Westmead, Huntingwood and Campbelltown experienced much stronger growth. Unlike eastern Sydney where the CBD experienced strong growth, there was only a marginal increase in employment in Sydney’s second CBD, Parramatta.

All this would seem to suggest that strategies to concentrate employment are having more success in Western Sydney. However, there are some major qualifications. The increase in employment in the GWS centres has come off a very low base, with the result that centres-based employment still makes up only 25.3% of all employment in the region and a mere 7.8% of Sydney’s overall employment. Furthermore, much of this growth has occurred in centres such as Norwest and Castle Hill which are very poorly served by public transport (Norwest alone accounted for 37% of the growth in centre-based employment in Western Sydney).

In the next few posts I’ll consider the relationship of employment to population growth and the resulting transport implications.

In December 2008 the NSW Transport Data Centre (TDC) released Employment and Commuting in Sydney’s Centres, 1996 – 2006, which detailed employment and commuting statistics for Sydney’s 33 largest employment centres based on the Metropolitan Strategy centres hierarchy. This came out around the same time as the research conducted by the University of Western Sydney (UWS) Urban Research Centre in developing the Western Sydney employment strategies for WSROC. These studies complement each other and deserve further attention.

The TDC report notes that in 2006 there were 1,923,900 people employed in the Sydney statistical division (SD) in 2006, with 716,500 jobs (37%) located in the 33 centres. Between 2001 and 2006, 71,350 new jobs were created in Sydney, with 26,600 (37%) of these jobs in centres. The report also notes that employment growth was much higher between 1996 and 2001 than in the 2001 to 2006 period. Between 1996 and 2001 employment in centres grew by 13% and across the Sydney SD by 9%, whilst between 2001 and 2006 employment slowed to a growth rate of 4% for both employment centres and the Sydney SD.

Whilst the TDC report provides a great overview, further analysis based on centre locations shows that there are strong regional variations. In this post I will start with a snapshot of employment in 2006. Before we start, a word of warning: the following figures which have been derived from this TDC report should be viewed with some caution. There is a significant degree of undercounting and failure to answer census questions specifically related to employment. For example, we don’t know where around 6% of the Sydney workforce works and another 4% have no fixed location. I have left these “location unknown” workers out of most of the following statistics.

Another complication is that changes between the 2001 and 2006 censuses which make it difficult to compare them. For example, the TDC report notes that 2006 journey to work data uses place of usual residence, while previous in years the place of enumeration was used for home location and trip origin.

In addition, I have used LGA-level data from another TDC journey to work table, which has slightly different employment totals to those in the centres report. Also, whilst the TDC centres are based on those in the Metropolitan Strategy, the data is not directly comparable to the figures in the Metro document. Above all, this material does not take into account the impact of the many changes that have occurred since 2006, including the global financial crisis. All this means that the following analysis should be seen as a guide and no responsibility is taken for its accuracy.

With the warnings out of the way, let’s have a look at the stats. Eastern Sydney obviously has the majority of employment and the majority of centres as defined by the TDC – 20, compared to 13 in Western Sydney. Of the people employed in centres, only 21% work in Greater Western Sydney (GWS) Within eastern Sydney (for these purposes, the area covered by the rest of the councils in the Sydney Statistical Division but outside the GWS region), over 230,000 people are employed in the CBD alone.

In fact, the CBD accounts for 12% of Sydney’s total employment – this makes up nearly a third of all of Sydney’s centres-based employment and over 20% of eastern Sydney’s jobs. Almost another 30% of eastern Sydney jobs are in other centres, which means that just under half the east’s employment is centre-based (table 1).

TABLE 1: SYDNEY EMPLOYMENT BY LOCATION, 2006 – Eastern Sydney and Western Sydney

Source: based on NSW Transport Data Centre data

*  Eastern Sydney – all Sydney LGAs outside Greater Western Sydney

** Western Sydney – the 14 LGAs comprising Greater Western Sydney

#  Not in centres totals based on TDC LGA employment tables

The story in Western Sydney is very different. Employment is much more dispersed – only just over a quarter of the region’s centre-based jobs are in TDC-defined centres and no one centre dominates. Parramatta, with just over 34,000 jobs, is Western Sydney’s biggest employment centre but accounts for under 6% of the region’s employment, with 19.6% of the region’s jobs located in other centres (table 2 and graph 1).

TABLE 2: SYDNEY EMPLOYMENT BY REGION SUMMARY, 2006

Source: based on NSW Transport Data Centre data

 * Eastern Sydney – all Sydney LGAs outside Greater Western Sydney

** Western Sydney – the 14 LGAs comprising Greater Western Sydney

#  Not in centres totals based on TDC LGA employment tables

Graph 1:

In my next post I’ll look at changes in employment centres from 2001 to 2006.