Human Capital in Remote and Rural Australia: The Role of Graduate Migration

In this paper we examine the spatial employment patterns of Australia's university graduates in nonurban locations. Using a 2006 data set recording the employment status of 65,661 university graduates 6 months after their graduation we examine how the personal and human capital characteristics of the individual university graduate affect the type of rural location into which he or she enters for employment purposes. The importance of identifying which types of graduates work where is essential for our understanding of the forces that are currently shaping the spatial distribution of human capital across Australia's regions. In order to do this we allocate postcode‐based data of graduate employment to one of five remoteness classes, as defined by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, that allow us to distinguish between different degrees of rurality. The postcode data are used to associate the ways in which the human capital characteristics of the graduate in terms of the types of university degrees awarded and the universities attended, as well as the personal characteristics of the graduate, are related to the degrees of rurality in his or her employment outcomes.     

Decoding Australia's China threat narrative during 2016–2021

Australia–China relations began to sour in 2016, and the China threat narrative began to dominate since then. Unlike previous studies which either use a qualitative approach or cross-sectional dataset for empirical analysis, this study creatively creates high-frequency weekly and monthly time series datasets using the Google Trends search results during January 2016–February 2021. Based on a series of time series modellings, this study examines the roles of various actors, including China's own policies, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and Clive Hamilton, various factors, including Chinese purchase of Australian housing, Chinese investment in Australia, Chinese students in Australia and China's rise and various media outlets, including the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Australian Financial Review, Sydney Morning Herald, Daily Telegraph and Herald Sun, in contributing to Australia's China threat narrative. This study makes significant contributions to academia in methods by bringing a new quantitative approach to international relations studies and to policy-makers as well by quantifying the roles of various actors, factors and media outlets in Australia's China policy debate.     

Fijian teachers on the move: Causes,implications and policies

Abstract: Education has increasingly come to be seen as a potent development tool, not least because the quality of the education system today affects a country's development for decades to come. The migration of teachers – both internationally by way of emigration and internally within countries – may adversely affect the quality of education especially in a country like Fiji with a limited human resource capacity. The emigration of workers, particularly of highly skilled workers who are endowed with high levels of human capital, has severe implications for a small country like Fiji. The emigration of teachers who are the largest professional group of migrants has led to the filling of vacancies by less experienced and junior teachers and is widely believed to have led to falling educational standards. In addition to international migration, there is substantial internal migration of teachers, mostly away from remote schools to urban areas. Rural schools find it particularly difficult to recruit and keep qualified and experienced personnel. In the process, rural areas have been drained of some of their best human resources. This article provides an overview of the scale of migration of secondary teachers from Fiji, raises development issues connected to the international and internal migration of teachers, describes policy responses that this migration has elicited and identifies areas requiring further research with a view to making policy recommendations as well as contributing to the literature on skilled migration in the Pacific.     

Global production networks,the developmental state and the articulation of Asia Pacific economies in the commercial aircraft industry

Abstract: Asia Pacific economies – particularly Japan, South Korea, China and Singapore – play a large and growing role in the commercial aircraft industry, despite the fact that the region has no major independent plane‐maker. Instead, Asia has secured a significant position in the increasingly elaborate global production networks of Boeing and Airbus. The wider Asian significance in those networks has been fostered not only by the region's deep capital and human resource assets but also by the catalytic actions of developmental states in the region. Moreover, decades of rapid air traffic growth have made Asia a crucial market for Boeing and Airbus. In response, the American and European giants have been compelled to outsource more of their business to Asia in order to win sales and to design new airliners tailored to the needs of Asian customers. Together, the increased importance of Asia in both the design and the manufacture of commercial aircraft point to a future in which Asia will capture an ever‐larger share of the value created in one of the world's most technologically sophisticated and strategically significant industries.     

Shenzhen in China's Financial Center Networks

Shenzhen, China, aspires to be an international financial center; however, its financial sector occupies an anomalous position in China's networks. The sector is tightly integrated into mainland networks, and Shenzhen's local banks provide access to Hong Kong's networks. Nonetheless, the city's proximity to Hong Kong, the Asia‐Pacific center of financial networks, confers few incremental benefits compared to those received by other mainland centers. The proposed Qianhai financial district, which is to be a laboratory for opening China's capital accounts, does not differentially boost Shenzhen because other financial centers will be allowed to experiment. A network theory of financial centers provides the explanatory framework for interpreting Shenzhen in China's financial center networks. Empirical analyses focus on Shenzhen's network ties with the Mainland and with Hong Kong. Shenzhen's future rests on the capacity of its financial firms to participate in the networks of South China, as well as to operate across the Mainland.     

A Malaysia–United States free trade agreement: Malaysian media and domestic resistance

This article examines Malaysia's civil society resistance to a bilateral free trade agreement (FTA) with the United States, focusing specifically on the role played by domestic mainstream and alternative media in raising awareness of trade negotiations. While challenges to a Malaysia–United States FTA may appear muted – especially if compared with the outpouring of dissent witnessed on the streets of Thailand and South Korea against similar deals with the United States – Malaysia's civil society agents have employed a range of mechanisms to oppose the agreement. Although these activists have focused their efforts on different sections of the proposed FTA – from intellectual property rights to food sovereignty to government procurement procedures – all share a common call for greater transparency in the negotiation process and greater public and parliamentary consultation. This article takes a critical look at who is involved in these resistance efforts, their key issues of concern, limitations to their success, and, most importantly, their relationship with and use of local media.     

Making connections: Hearing and sharing Macassan‐Yolηu stories

Yol?u people living in northeast Arnhem Land regularly celebrate their connections with the Macassan trepangers from Indonesian Sulawesi in storytelling, art and music. The history of this contact is well known in academic literature, and these stories of Macassan contact are told regularly by Yol?u people to tourists visiting northeast Arnhem Land. This paper explores the impact that hearing stories about the Macassans from one Yol?u family's tourism business had on a group of Australian Indonesian language teachers, visiting as part of an Endeavour Language Teaching Fellowship. It draws on ideas related to telling and hearing stories and argues that these particular stories enabled the teachers to make powerful connections: with each other and with Australia's histories and geographies. The paper also explores the ways in which the teachers went on to become storytellers themselves, using stories to make connections in their students' learning.     

Small‐scale cattle raising in East Java,Indonesia: A pathway out of poverty?

Despite its small area and intensively cropped landscape, East Java accounts for 30% of Indonesia's cattle population. About two million households draw on family labour to raise cattle in backyard sheds and small enclosures, largely for cash income. In this paper, we examine the opportunity for such small‐scale producers to benefit from Indonesia's economic transformation, given the rising urban demand for beef. The paper reports on a study in two contrasting sites in East Java – irrigated lowlands and rainfed uplands – to explore the constraints facing small‐scale cattle producers in these environments, the means by which they have adapted to these constraints (especially by going beyond the farm household to access feed supplies) and possible means to enhance their production systems and incomes. The findings suggest that such cattle production systems can provide a viable source of livelihood, even for resource‐poor households; hence, appropriately adapted cattle improvement programmes are a sensible component of a pro‐poor development strategy.     

Capturing cluster life cycle with a mixed‐method analysis: Evidence from a French cluster case study

This article contributes to the growing literature on cluster life cycles (CLC) by demonstrating the opportunities offered by a mixed‐method approach. The combination of qualitative and quantitative data is useful both to describe the evolution of network patterns and to provide an understanding of the drivers of CLC. Based on the literature, we rely on a theoretical background integrating the pre‐existing context (cognitive, institutional, and social) in which actors involved in the nascent cluster are embedded, in order to capture the impact of the genesis period on the cluster's subsequent trajectory. The operationalization of this mixed‐method focused on one case study highlights the determining period of the genesis, since CLC is rooted in (a) the building of interpersonal relationships between actors from science and industry, (b) a longstanding specialization in a technological domain, and (c) policy opportunities and guidelines. The cluster trajectory remains driven by the initial policies, the cluster's nascent specialization and the founders' pre‐existing relationships over time, with an evolving role of each type of embeddedness over time.     

Ireland's Foreign‐Owned Technology Sector: Evolving Towards Sustainability?

ABSTRACT For some, Ireland's pursuit of an exogenous‐led development model has proved to be the cornerstone of recent economic success. Others point to recent high‐profile closures and argue that foreign‐owned operations are attracted to Ireland solely because of the advantageous tax breaks and lucrative grants scheme offered by the Irish government. We pay tribute to both arguments by pushing the level of enquiry beyond that of supply and backward linkages to try and gauge the actual performance of affiliates themselves. This brings some interesting facets of the Irish foreign direct investment scene to light. We highlight complexity of process, attainment of broader investment remits, and the emergence of a managerial class as integral to the ability of affiliates to adapt to and exploit organisational change. By examining 10 case studies and making use of media searches and company interviews, we highlight evidence of Ireland's largest technology transnational corporation affiliates showing positive performance advances. With these movements come, what we term, increased nodal significance of Irish operations within the global production network of their corporations. We argue against policy and theories that see these movements as linear and provide evidence of how some Irish operations have leveraged control and gained significant regional and global remits that have resulted in their growing significance, both in the corporation and in the country in which they are based. In the same line we argue that embeddedness in terms of supply linkages does not fit the Irish case and instead employ the term “network anchoring” of affiliates as they increase their nodal weighting through increased mandates.     

Bank Restructuring and Access to Financial Services: The Spanish Case

The Spanish bank sector has restructured extensively since the crisis erupted in 2008 in an attempt to correct the imbalances accumulated during the preceding boom years. Thanks to this restructuring effort, Spain's branch network has been pared back by 32 percent, prompting questions about potential ramifications for the population's access to financial services. Against this backdrop, this paper quantifies, at the municipal level, the segment of the population without access to a bank branch in their home town between 2008 and 2015, paving the way for analysis of the impact of the restructuring effort. It also analyses the role played by the three kinds of deposit institutions in Spain in providing access to financial services via their branch networks. The results show that although the percentage of the Spanish population without access to a branch in their home town has risen, the increase has been small, albeit marked by significant differences from one province to the next. The savings banks (including the former cajas that have converted to banks) are still the most important financial institutions in terms of facilitating branch access to financial services.     

Dynamic Bayesian networks in molecular plant science: inferring gene regulatory networks from multiple gene expression time series

To understand the processes of growth and biomass production in plants, we ultimately need to elucidate the structure of the underlying regulatory networks at the molecular level. The advent of high-throughput postgenomic technologies has spurred substantial interest in reverse engineering these networks from data, and several techniques from machine learning and multivariate statistics have recently been proposed. The present article discusses the problem of inferring gene regulatory networks from gene expression time series, and we focus our exposition on the methodology of Bayesian networks. We describe dynamic Bayesian networks and explain their advantages over other statistical methods. We introduce a novel information sharing scheme, which allows us to infer gene regulatory networks from multiple sources of gene expression data more accurately. We illustrate and test this method on a set of synthetic data, using three different measures to quantify the network reconstruction accuracy. The main application of our method is related to the problem of circadian regulation in plants, where we aim to reconstruct the regulatory networks of nine circadian genes in Arabidopsis thaliana from four gene expression time series obtained under different experimental conditions.     

Ordering the exemplary urban spaces: A critical analysis of Hanoi's embellishment projects

Vietnam has a long tradition of social engineering through which the ordering of urban space has effectively been used to enforce the state's vision of political and social order. With the country currently in transition from a centrally planned to a market‐oriented economy, the ordering of urban spaces is currently all the more important. This is prominently manifested in the numerous beautification projects that are being implemented in Vietnamese cities. This article explores recent ordering endeavours and considers the way they are legitimated and contested in Vietnam's new socio‐political context. Three beautification projects in Hanoi are examined using materials from policy documents, professional journals and media coverage. The article argues that state ordering actions and the ‘exemplary’ urban spaces they seek to create are embodiments of a complex system of orders of powers in transitional Vietnam, in which political visions of modernist socialism and the new market‐oriented agenda are sometimes in alignment and sometimes clash. Overall, the state's failure in sustaining these ‘exemplary’ urban spaces is emblematic of this hybrid system.     

Australia's PSWPS: Development impacts in the first two years

This research note presents an analysis of the development impacts of Australia's Pacific Seasonal Worker Pilot Scheme. We estimate the gain per participating household to be approximately A$2600, which is a 39% increase in per‐capita annual income in participating households. The aggregate impact to date is small, but the experience of New Zealand's larger programme shows that seasonal worker programmes can potentially have large aggregate effects.     

Reconsidering North Korean defectors: Social and semantic network analyses of YouTube videos on North Korean defectors

This study investigates the North Korean defector phenomenon by approaching YouTube as an internet forum for public discourse, using the novel analytic approaches of social network analysis, text mining and semantic analysis. The research produced three main findings. First, individual YouTube content creators are most influential in the video networks pertaining to the subject of North Korean defectors. Second, on YouTube space, the image of North Korea tends to be negative because of the prevalence of defectors' testimony of their life experiences. Finally, such negative narratives of North Korea on YouTube might have a negative influence by blocking the reunification of Korea. In conclusion, this study suggests the South Korean government and other relevant global actors should conduct thorough and continuous examinations of North Korean defectors' perceptions of South Koreans and vice versa. This study calls for the international community to take further action to formulate proper policy instruments.     

Work and struggle of fishing livelihoods in the Delta: Development and ‘new’ change along the Ayeyarwady (Irrawaddy) River,Myanmar

Fishing constitutes a key source of income and food for rural communities worldwide. This is the case in predominantly rural Myanmar (World Fish, 2019), particularly in the Ayeyarwady (Irrawaddy) River Delta. Fishing has long been a central livelihood strategy and valuable source of food security in the Delta, and now also generates a substantial contribution to the gross domestic product. However, the livelihood practices of the fishers, particularly small‐scale fishers, are largely ‘invisible’ in the literature and policy. In this article, we advance understanding of the significant but understudied livelihoods of small‐scale fishers through interviews with fishers and a range of other actors in 2018. Taking a careful examination of the challenges, practices and responses of fishers in the Delta, our research underlines that fishers are important actors in the ‘making’ of the Delta as a geographical scale and concept, yet they are being pushed out of the very landscape they have helped co‐create and have lived in for generations. At this crucial point in Myanmar's development and change, we contend that a better understanding of the livelihoods of fishing households, as some of the nation's most vulnerable, is important for inclusive policy development, economic reforms and research strategy going forward.     

From saving to survivance: Rethinking Indigenous Papuan women's vulnerabilities in Jayapura,Indonesia

Racism, sexism and gendered violence disadvantage Indigenous Papuan women, yet government responses often focus on individual interventions like ‘raising awareness’ or training. In this article, we build on efforts to challenge these narratives about women's vulnerabilities. We draw on life history interviews with older Papuan women in Jayapura to rethink vulnerabilities and everyday struggles in the context of structural inequalities. We interpret their stories as forms of ‘survivance’ and argue that contrary to dominant perspectives, Papuan women are not economic novices or passive victims. Rather, opportunities have narrowed over time, and women's long history of activity, strategy, persistence and resistance has largely been forgotten. Women's life histories shed light on urban colonialism and Indigenous survivance in Jayapura since the 1940s, when Jayapura was still a Dutch colonial capital and not yet an Indonesian frontier. In a time dominated by concerns about Papuan demise, their experiences are provocative for rethinking vulnerabilities.     

Chinese Indonesians in a rapidly changing nation: Pressures of ethnicity and identity

Abstract: Throughout periods of political instability and economic adversity – from Dutch colonial rule, through President Suharto's period in office, to more recent times – ethnic Chinese in Indonesia have been recurrent scapegoats for violence. Suharto, especially, manipulated local perceptions of the Chinese in the economic and political arenas, to suit the needs of his government. Yet, circumstances have changed since the 1998 riots in Indonesia and Suharto's departure. Subsequent presidents have introduced legislation aimed at reducing legal restrictions on Chinese Indonesians and they, in turn, are beginning to have greater public voice through a diversity of outlets. These include the growth of numerous new print and television media; a flourishing literature sphere; the rise of a variety of political parties, both ethnicity‐based and more wide‐ranging; and the development of non‐political organisations, some tackling discrimination and others focusing upon Chinese sociocultural needs. These channels are facilitating the appearance of new and re‐emerging ethnic Chinese identities, some surfacing from over 30 years of imposed dormancy. This paper is a preliminary investigation of manifestations of these identities among ethnic Chinese in Indonesia's contemporary public realm.     

Multisited Versus Compact Producer Service Firms: Insights from the French Case

Much of the literature on the location of producer services is concerned with their uneven spatial development across regions. Although this approach is useful, it proves to be limited, and a complementary analytical framework is required. This paper uses data from France's Annual Survey of Services to address producer service location from a novel perspective, that of the firm. A basic distinction is made between single site (compact) and multisite (network) producer service firms, and the natures of these two types are analyzed in terms of business strategies, location and performance. Further analyses are then based upon the distinctions between sales and servuction networks, and between specialized and diversified networks. Although significant for producing higher output levels, a network structure does not necessarily ensure a higher level of profitability.