Rural-Urban Interaction in NL: Understanding & Managing Functional Regions

Functional Regions Element Update

Funding support provided by the Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador Labour Market Development Agreement

UpDate June 17, 09UpDate June 17, 09

A SimmsDept. GeographyMemorial UniversityD FreshwaterUniversity of KentuckyJ Ward (RA)Masters CandidateGeography

Economic Zones

Functional Regions

Health Authorities

Functional Regions

Rural Secretariat

Functional Regions

Highlights• Validating functional regions with existing geography (Will be

completed before the end of June; Paper by early fall?)

• Open source software selected for “Regional Economic Capacity Index” and “Labour market Potential”

• Regional/Labour Market software application development is in progress

• Software has ability to do statistical/comparative analysis

• Spatial econometrics (test) application will be completed by September 2009

• Final model will be ready by March 2010.

Highlights• Jamie Ward’s MSc. thesis titled "The Effect of Urban Proximity

on Age Structure and Economic Growth in Rural Newfoundland and Labrador.“ is in progress and will be completed by fall 2010.

• A report by René A. Enguehard titled “Open-Source Stack for Spatial Econometrics: Recommendations for the CRRF Rural-Urban Interactions Project” is available. This report includes documentation of justification for using open source platform independent software.

• This summer 2 software engineers (RAs )working on model, 1 spatial econometrics RA working on algorithms for model, 1 RA dealing with data organization issues.

• Expect to hire an economist (RA) shortly to help with the model.

• The objective of the final geography for the functional regions is to take advantage of both the Census data and the community accounts data structures.

• Relevant data can be extracted from “Community Accounts” and directly integrated to the final application

• Ideally, the model will require long term employment data for the final model (HRLE?)

• Short run dynamics graphic has list of preliminary inputs!

Highlights (data)

Regional Economic Capacity Index• Is a decision support tool that identifies local and regional conditions for

supporting economic development strategies

• Is a modular tool from which one can extract information on local infrastructure , labour market potential, human resources, etc.

• Is a “flexible approach” whereby new factors can be added or old ones removed from the analysis

• Is a “sensitivity analysis” tool that can be used to determine the impacts of adding or removing inputs from an analysis. For example, what do you need to improve the economic capacity of your region?

• Is a comparative tool where different regions can be compared to each other

• Is an information tool that can be used to identify resources and potential for economic development

• Is an information tool that can be used to support the development of policy and governance models

Regional Economic Capacity Index Sample of Inputs

EntrepreneurshipSelf-employmentAvailable financingNon-resource employment

Labour ResourcesEducationEmployment informationDistance to training facilities

InfrastructureTransportation and CostsCommunicationsPublic servicesEducationLocal services

Economic EnvironmentIndustrial parksCommercial shoppingFinancial InstitutionEconomic development agenciesProximity of urban centreConcentration of retail business

Extract labour market potential

Identifying labour market potential

• Spatial econometric methods will be used to combine and evaluate factors that can be used to assess “labour market potential”:

– Population characteristics (distribution and demographics)

– Economic structure and activities

– Labour market analysis (employment, unemployment, trainability of workforce, etc.)

– Road distance between communities and local services

– Transportation costs (e.g. for commuters, industry, services, etc.)

Examples of inputs for the regional economic capacity index model.

Example: 2006 demographic assessment

Decline high proportion of aged and decreasing numbers in younger age groups

Stationary low number of children, approximately equal numbers in most aged groups with decreasing numbers in the aged group

Stable reflects slow growth over time (variability in all age groups that tend to even out)

Expanding high proportion of children, a high rate of population growth with a low number of older people

Preliminary Results

• First order retail centres have the highest level of services available (multiple malls, box store complexes etc.)

• Sixth order centres will only provide minimum retail activity.

• Having a higher order retail centre in a region may be a way of preventing capital from leaving an area.

Labrador Straits

Level of retail activity:

Preliminary Results

Impact of transportation costs on size of labour market catchment areas.

As transportation costs increase the effective size of a labour market area is reduced.

Preliminary Results

• High dependency on a specified industry in a majority of communities, within a region, produces high to very high dispersion for a region suggesting that the jobs, regionally, are distributed amongst the communities fairly evenly.

• This analysis provides insight to employment dependencies within a region and the vulnerability of labour markets to fluctuations in a particular industry.

Concentration and Dependency Indices

Employment Dependency Index Employment Concentration Index

Thank-youDiscussion?