Investigating the coherence of regions in Australia's economic geography

This paper analyses data at an official Australian spatial regionalisation based on administrative boundaries and compares it to an alternative aggregation of Australia’s statistical geography based on commuting data. The alternative aggregation is defined as a functional region that is better equipped to capture the mechanisms of the existing labour markets and provide better information to policymakers. Several tests are employed to investigate the coherence of the small areas that make up these functional regions. It is found that the functional aggregation based on commuting data shows greater coherence for labour participation data, but not for income data.