An economic and financial geography of the Australian superannuation industry

The Australian superannuation industry has grown enormously over the past 30 years. Whereas working people are automatically enrolled at their workplaces, the head offices of many industry funds are in Melbourne rather than Sydney. Melbourne’s dominance of the superannuation industry is explained, in part, by happenstance—the location of major unions and employer groups and their initiatives in response to the enabling legislation. Other factors identified include opportunism, cooperation, and the advantages of growth. Government-prompted mergers and acquisitions have also reinforced the dominance of Melbourne, notwithstanding attempts by Sydney-based superannuation funds to out-compete their Melbourne rivals. Whereas the geographical bifurcation of the Australian superannuation industry has been mediated by the formation of a Queensland-based superfund “champion,” it is suggested that it faces numerous challenges. In conclusion, avenues for future research are sketched, focusing upon the future of Melbourne as the centre of the superannuation industry, the role of digital platforms in service delivery, pension adequacy, and the increasing importance of Australian funds in global financial markets.     

Conveying Mission Through Outcome Measurement: Services to the Homeless in New York City

This paper outlines the policy decision to implement a performance incentive program in a large social services agency. Specifically, it describes the evolution of services to homeless people in New York City, including the creation of the New York City Department of Homeless Services, the privatization of a majority of the shelter system, and the redefinition of the role of government in the provision of homeless services. It explains how performance measurement is an integral part of this evolution, and the numerous challenges that this initiative has presented to management of the Department.     

Institutional Influences on EU Funded Regional Technology Development in the UK: A Study of the Yorkshire and East London Regions in the 1990s

This paper seeks to place policy research undertaken in the Yorkshire and East London regions of the UK within the broader context of regional innovation system building. In particular, it attempts to draw out the releasing factors and conditions that shaped stakeholder relationships in these two EU Objective Two regions during the 1990s. This is undertaken with a view to drawing out conclusions about the extent of autonomy, institutional lock-in and compatibility within regional governance. The extent to which such EU stimulated influences are relevant to the practice of regional technological development is explored in areas which have experienced industrial restructuring.     

The City of London in the Asian crisis

This paper seeks to understand the Asian crisis through theeyes of the City of London. Relying upon material provided byThe Financial Times (FT), we construct an index of pessimismto chart the dominant City of London interpretation of the pathof the crisis. This index is set against data on the actualperformance of the Hong Kong, and Tokyo, London, and New Yorkstock markets over the same period. We have the luxury of retrospectivelyreconstructing the actual path of the crisis whereas the FT(and global financial markets) had to respond to specific eventsin a chain of apparent cumulative events. Our goal is to explainthe construction of the dominant pessimistic interpretationof the path of the crisis, placing the City of London in thecontext of global markets (in time, between Tokyo and New York).In the penultimate section of the paper we report on an interviewwith Riley, the FT columnist, about the results of our analysis,emphasizing the apparent homogeneity of information and opinionin the City of London as opposed to New York. The conclusionfocuses upon the implications of this argument for the studyof discontinuities between global markets, and the future offinancial centres.     

Integrating Transportation Network and Regional Economic Models to Estimate the Costs of a Large Urban Earthquake

In this paper we summarize an integrated, operational model of losses due to earthquake impacts on transportation and industrial capacity, and how these losses affect the metropolitan economy. The procedure advances the information provided by transportation and activity system analysis techniques in ways that help capture the most important ecomonic implications of earthquakes. Network costs and origin-destination requirements are modeled endogenously and consistently. Indirect and induced losses associated with direct impacts on transportation and industrial capacity are distributed across zones and ecomonic sectors. Preliminary results are summarized for a magnitude 7.1 earthquake on the Elysian Park blind thrust fault in Los Angeles.     

Bodies that sweat: the affective responses of young women in Wollongong,New South Wales,Australia

I argue that people's bodily sensations of sweat – smell, touch and sight – can provide insights to the relations between subjectivity and space. I draw on feminist ideas of the body as a physiological, psychological and sociological assemblage out of which spatially situated knowledge, ethics, subjectivities and social relations are forged. Empirical evidence is drawn from self-reflexive accounts of 21 young women living in Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia. Their narratives convey how sweat and sweatiness are integral to negotiating everyday life. First, participants' narratives illustrate the way the sweaty body-as-seen is bound up with gendered identities and self-disgust. Second, visceral experiences of the materialities of sweat and sweatiness often give rise to a heightened sense of bodily awareness, self and spatial marginalisation in the course of everyday lives. Third, participants' narratives highlight the tensions of spatial experience of sweat and sweatiness that simultaneously attract and repel bodies. Visceral experiences of sweat and sweatiness are central to better understanding of the spatiality of subjectivity.     

“It's About Time You Came Out”: Sexualities,Mobility and Home

Abstract: Helping redress the dominance of metropolitan narratives upon which much literature on sexuality is framed, this article interprets the narrative told by a “white” 16‐year‐old man living in regional Australia. Our aim is to investigate the intersections of migration and homemaking in sexual subject formation. Finding a place to call “home” can be a complex process for young men born in regional Australia and not conforming to the social formations of a “normal guy”. This young man's narrative expressively reveals the fluidity and spatiality inherent in processes of negotiating sexual subjectivities. His story provides telling insights into how migration and mobility change his understandings of home and of self by making possible a third‐space configured by neither the gender norms of his hometown nor the “gay scene” in Sydney.     

Land Absorption in U.S. Metropolitan Areas: Estimates and Projections from Regional Adjustment Models

This article adapts a regional adjustment model to estimate and project the spatial outcome of population and employment growth in U.S. metropolitan areas. The three-equation multiplicative model of population change, employment change, and land absorption is estimated using three-stage least squares to account for endogeneity among the dependent variables and contemporaneous correlation across the system of equations. In addition to the core model, alternative specifications are estimated, imposing the initial conditions of size, land availability, and economic structure. The stability of the solutions is then examined using reduced-form equations estimated via the seemingly unrelated regression equations approach. The results reveal substantive evidence that population and employment growth are jointly determined, of how the two affect the outcome of land development, and, perhaps most importantly, stable and fractionally reasonable estimates at projected equilibrium points. Lastly, the adapted model controlling for the initial condition of land availability is used to project patterns of land consumption at equilibrium in 50 rapid-growth metropolitan areas.