Comparing Socio-Spatial Mobility and Its Outcomes in Australia and New Zealand

Abstract

Households choose places from a hierarchy of options defined by social, economic and environmental contexts and these choices are conditioned by age, family status and economic contexts. While we know a good deal about the choice processes we know somewhat less about the spatial outcomes of these decisions apart from the well-established distance minimization of most moves. Recent research has begun to fill that gap and in this paper I unpack an earlier study of mobility across communities clustered by measures of disadvantage and extend that study to a comparable analysis of mobility in Australia. Specifically, I use the New Zealand Deprivation Index and the SEIFA index in the Household Income and Labour Dynamics Survey in Australia (HILDA) to construct matrices of socio-spatial movement and consider the relationship between in-flows and out-flows, the interaction of moves with age and education and the relationship of initial location with mobility outcomes.