Australia: Trap or Opportunity?: Natural Resource Dependence, Scale, and the Evolution of New Economies in the Space/Time of New South Wales' northern tablelands

Abstract

The fortunes of rural economies, alongside the housing, labor, financial, and industrial subsystems of which they are at least partly comprised, seem to depend increasingly on the extent and nature of their incorporation into national, international, and/or global trading networks. Unfortunately, not all regions-or nations-have equal capability to choose the nature of their insertion into such networks. A core message of the geographical political economy literature (Sheppard, 2011 ), and the "variegated capitalism" research (Peck and Theodore, 2007), is that, due to a mixture of differing histories, initial resource endowments and institutional frameworks, the global economic landscape strongly resembles a mosaic, a patchwork of strongly and subtly contrasting hues, even where capitalism is the dominant paradigm for organizing an economic system. History and place matter! The case study regions considered in this edited collection have, by and large, a shared history of being inserted into national and international economies based on their capacities to provide abundant cheap and good quality (and largely untransformed) natural resource commodities to the metropolitan cores of their imperial masters. Not surprisingly, such long-established patterns of development have produced-or at least substantially shaped-the industrial structure of these regions and their constituent local economies and labor markets. Such structural formations, once established, tend to have an enduring influence over the future social, demographic, and economic trajectories of the region.