Spatial Concentration in Australian Regional Development, Exogenous Shocks and Regional Demographic Outcomes: a South Australian case study

ABSTRACT

As a tribute to the massive contribution of our friend and colleague Graeme Hugo to the population and settlement geography of Australian rural areas, this paper presents a longitudinal study from his home State. It forms part of a wider study of the long-term demographic relationships between Australia’s rapidly growing regional cities and their surrounding functional regions. Of particular interest is the question of what effect the accelerating concentration of population and economic activity into a given regional city will have for the longer term demographic sustainability of its functional region as a whole. Taking the case of Port Lincoln, regional capital of most of South Australia’s Eyre Peninsula, it examines the nature of change in the functional region over the period 1947–2011, and investigates the forces feeding, and partly counteracting, the population concentration process, informed by concepts of evolutionary economic geography. In particular it traces the demographic impact (particularly differential migration and ageing trends) of exogenous shocks to the region’s essentially primary productive economic base during the period of major change from 1981 to 2011.

KEY WORDS:

• Regional cities
• exogenous shocks
• net migration
• depopulation
• regional population change
• rural communities
• South Australia

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the helpful comments of the journal editors and two anonymous referees, and the expert assistance of Mr Jarrod Lange in the preparation of the figures.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Staples theory, building on the original work of Innis (1930, 1933), proposes that the economic development of outlying regions is stimulated by remote demand for specific, locally plentiful, primary resources (e.g. fish, furs, minerals, wheat) around which infrastructure for an export industry develops. Watkins (1963, 141) comments that ‘Economic development will be a process of diversification around an export base. The central concept of a staple theory, therefore, is the spread effects of the export sector.’ However, many factors such as the power of extra-regional vested interests and unevenly contested control of knowledge, wealth and force may impede or prevent such diversification (Comor 2001). Tonts, Martinus, and Plummer (2013) show how, rather than generating spread effects, regions focused on export staples may become locked in to an increasingly specialised and vulnerable economic trajectory.

2. In this region LGAs are spatially identical to Statistical Local Areas (SLAs).

3. For the six intercensal periods, net migration was estimated for each quinquennial age group using the cohort survival method. For each age group results were summed (maintaining sign) over the 30 years. Summing these results for all of the 17 age groups (ignoring sign) gives the total net person-movements for the period. Total 1981–2011 net movement by migration in the whole region (−8909, Figure 4A) is less than the combination of Port Lincoln (−4201, Figure 4B) and the seven minor communities (−6037, Figure 4C) due to the intra-regional component of the flows.

4. The migration effectiveness ratio is given by (net migration/gross migration)*100.

5. The index is a summation of the aggregate percentage shrinkage of the age groups potentially capable of reproduction (0–44), plus the aggregate expansion of the post-reproductive groups (45+). To allow for non-zero summation, the sign of the percentage differences of the latter group is switched so that all ageing is expressed as negative values, while positive values indicate rejuvenation. The index is cumulative in that the sum of RAI values calculated for several consecutive periods is identical to that calculated for the period in its entirety.