The last major contraction experienced by the Australian economy took place over the period 1989/90 - 1992/93. In that period aggregate employment fell by 7.5% in Victoria but only by 2.9% in New South Wales. This paper aims to do two things. First, to explain why there is such a large...

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...