The economic value of places within your LGA

What economic contribution does a place make? How many industries are in this area and how productive are they? Is our local shopping area the main contributor to the economic output of our place?

These and more questions can now be answered with a new feature of economy.id – estimating value-added by small areas within your LGA.

Here at .id we’re always looking for ways to improve our information toolkit and provide you with the information you need to answer important questions about your population and economy.

The latest edition is value-add by location by industry.

This is not new data. It could be calculated before, but this makes it easy to see where your economic hotspots are, within your area.

We have the number of workers per destination zone, based on the Bureau of Transport Research imputation of the ABS work destination numbers. And we have the worker productivity for each worker. Simply multiplying them together on an industry by industry basis gives a broad idea of the concentration of industry value in an area.

This is now found in the “Spatial Economy – Employment locations” section of economy.id. When you go in here now, you have the option of choosing between “Number of workers” and “Value-added” under “Measure”. You can choose to map a particular industry or total of all industries.

Let’s have a look at an example.

The City of Penrith wants to know what the economic contribution of the Penrith CBD area is to the total economy. You can see under “Number of workers” that it employs approximately 10,800 people (2011 Census), which is 17.8% of the workforce.

But what is the value contribution of these industries? Switching the option to value-added shows that this area contributes $994m, just under $1 billion, and that’s around 18.3% of total economic value in the City of Penrith.

Looking at the breakdown, although it employs a lot of the workers, Retail Trade only contributes $117m, or 11.8% of value in this zone, while Public Administration and Safety, with its higher worker productivity is nearly 30% of the zone, and this zone makes up over half of the employment and value-add for this industry in the City of Penrith. This underscores the importance of the Penrith CBD as the hub for the higher value jobs within the region.

There are quite a few caveats on using this measure. There will always be some economic productivity which can’t be attributed to an exact place, due to people having no usual place of work, and travelling around to work. There is no modelling in here of interactions between the areas (though there is this modelling at the LGA level inherent in the model already). And there is an assumption that the productivity of an individual industry sector is the same no matter where in the LGA it is located. Nevertheless this is a great way to get a handle on the economic contribution of an area, particularly if you’re looking at a specific employment node or industrial zone.

We are continually looking for ways to improve our users economy.id experience. Have a suggestion for a new dataset, or a new way of looking at an existing dataset in economy.id? Please feel free to contact us.