Assessing the Effectiveness of Regional Policy Responses to Mass Redundancies: The Case of the Illawarra Region, Australia

Abstract

Regional economies historically reliant on large‐scale manufacturing are particularly susceptible to episodes of mass employee redundancies. This was evident in the case of the Illawarra region in 2011 following the announcement of BlueScope Steel to close one of its two remaining blast furnaces. In common with recent closures of large manufacturers in regional Australia, the Federal Government reacted with policies to help redundant workers obtain reemployment as well as investment attraction strategies to create employment in the region. The research presented here uses a longitudinal and mixed methods approach to analyse the effectiveness of these policies. We uncovered a number of deficiencies in the implementation and evaluation of these policies and offer a number of recommendations with respect to programme flexibility, stakeholder representation and government transparency.

Analysis on the Differences of Combination Effects of Science and Technology Innovation Policies

“…In addition, a few of them analyze the impact of policies from a quantitative perspective by establishing models. Wang et al used system dynamics to build a mechanism model of the impact of STI policies on regional innovation capability and studied the impact mechanism of different policies on regional innovation capability [ 9 ]; Avdiushchenko and Zając proposed a set of possible indicators to evaluate the progress of EU countries in realizing circular economy at the regional level [ 10 ]; O'Brien and Burrows used vertical and mixed methods to analyze the effectiveness of regional policies for large-scale layoffs [ 11 ]; Gülal and Ayaita took the introduction of minimum wage in Germany as the standard experiment and used the double difference model to analyze the impact of minimum wage on well-being [ 12 ]. Research on the effect of single policy: most of the existing research on the effect of STI policy is to study the effect of a single STI policy.…”

Regional Economic Development in Australia: Introduction to the Special Issue

“…The fifth paper by O’Brien and Burrows () reminds us that comparative advantage in a regional industry can change for the worse. The authors look at what happens when there are mass redundancies in a region – in this case the closure of two blast furnaces in the Illawarra.…”