Inventive economic modelling – the Alice Springs case study

One of the challenges experienced by regional areas of the world is the availability of baseline data to describe regional economic growth and development. This is often a challenge when population sizes in these regional centres are in tens of thousand, rather than in hundreds of thousands. The population of the Northern Territory (NT) is an estimated 219,818 (June 2008). The absence of baseline data for Alice Springs led to 'inventive economic modelling' and the use of surrogate measures to support evidence based decision-making to develop the most meaningful picture of the Alice Springs economy.