Unemployment Rate Dispersion in Melbourne: The ‘Regional’ Dimension

In this paper we examine unemployment rate dispersion across the (statistical) regions in the Melbourne metropolitan area. We find that the level of dispersion is positively correlated with the unemployment rate in all the regions taken together and that the ‘elasticity’ of dispersion with respect to the unemployment rate is unity, with the result that there is a tendency for the level of dispersion relative to the average unemployment rate to remain stationary over our sample period. We discuss the implications of this and show that the unemployment rate differences are persistent in the sense that the same areas exhibit relatively high (or low) unemployment rates over the whole of our sample period. We also estimate equilibrium rates of unemployment for the different regions in Melbourne and conjecture possible explanations for the differences in the level and in the persistence of the equilibrium rates.