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An Evaluation of the Financial Sustainability of Remote Australian Local Councils*
Author(s) -
Fellows Caillan,
Dollery Brian,
Marques Rui
Publication year - 2022
Publication title -
economic papers: a journal of applied economics and policy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.245
H-Index - 19
eISSN - 1759-3441
pISSN - 0812-0439
DOI - 10.1111/1759-3441.12334
Subject(s) - sustainability , local government , population , sample (material) , perspective (graphical) , government (linguistics) , empirical evidence , business , geography , regional science , public administration , political science , sociology , philosophy , demography , chromatography , epistemology , artificial intelligence , computer science , ecology , linguistics , chemistry , biology
Spatial remoteness in the sense of great distances between population centres and limited access to public services is an on‐going problem in Australian local government, where there exist large, sparsely populated regions dominated by the 'tyranny of distance'. From a public policy perspective, it is important to understand the impact of remoteness on local authorities. Accordingly, in this paper, we estimate the relationship between remoteness and financial sustainability using a 2014–2018 sample of Australian local governments. In general, we find only limited empirical evidence for a relationship between geographical remoteness and financial sustainability as we have proxied it.