Neil Argent
Biographic Data
| ID | 379985 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Neil Argent |
| GIVEN NAMES | Neil |
| FAMILY NAME | Argent |
| SIGNATURE | ARGENT N |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of New England |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4005-5837 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 61 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 636 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 61 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 15 |
Contrasting demographic trajectories in Northern New South Wales populations
In the contemporary academic literature, rural population decline has generally been regarded as a long‐running and almost natural phenomenon. This paper examines the complex temporal, spatial, and cultural dynamics of the population of an inland, largely agriculturally dependent rural region, the New South Wales New England and North West region (SA4 level) from the late 1990s to the 2021 Census. It investigates the key demographic processes tha…
Are Visa-Based Dispersal Policies Effective in Attracting and Retaining Skilled Migrants in Rural Australia
Australia offers regional visa schemes for skilled migrants who reside in nonmetropolitan Australia for a minimum of 2 years to alleviate nonmetropolitan depopulation and skills shortages. To assess the efficacy of this program in attracting and retaining migrants, we apply survival analysis to administrative longitudinal microdata from the Person Level Integrated Data Asset linked to census data from 2010 to 2020. We find that this program attra…
Retaining Permanent and Temporary Immigrants in Rural Australia: Place‐Based and Individual Determinants
In many low‐fertility countries, immigration is increasingly seen a solution to the twin problem of rural depopulation and skill shortages. In Australia, this takes the form of regional visa schemes that require both skilled and humanitarian migrants to reside initially in nonmetropolitan regions for a minimum of 2 years. In the absence of nationally representative longitudinal data, the efficacy of this policy is yet to be assessed. Applying sur…
Can reliable sub-state emigration estimates be obtained from an administrative population dataset? The case of the Person Level Integrated Data Asset (PLIDA) of Australia
Counterurbanisation in the time of the Covid-19 pandemic in New South Wales, 2016-21
The pitfalls and benefits of using administrative data for internal migration research: An evaluation of Australia's Person Level Integrated Data Asset (PLIDA)
BACKGROUNDTo enhance its data capability, Australia recently set up a longitudinal administrative micro-dataset, the Person Level Integrated Data Asset (PLIDA). OBJECTIVETo ensure that users in both scholarly and applied settings understand how PLIDA can be reliably used, we assess its Combined Location Module, which provides place of residence by combining three administrative datasets since 2006. METHODSUsing descriptive statistics and regressi…
Be careful what you wish for: Resource boomtowns and disillusionment in the Surat Basin
The socio-spatial politics of royalties and their distribution: A case study of the Surat Basin, Queensland
This paper is concerned with the socio-spatial and ethical politics of redistribution, specifically the allocation of natural resources rents from political and economic cores to the economic and geographical peripheries whence the resource originated. Based on a case study of the coal seam gas sector in Queensland's Surat Basin, this paper focuses on the operation of the Queensland State Government's regional development fund for mining and ener…
The Staples Thesis, local models and competitiveness: The Western Australian economy over the 2001–2011 resource boom
Conventionally, the Staples Thesis constitutes a hypothesis about both the historical and the geographical particularity of the developmental trajectories of resource-dependent economies (Staples Theory) and a methodology that prioritizes contextual or local knowledge (Staples Method). Situating the Staples Thesis in the conceptual framework of regulation theory, this paper develops a spatial econometric model of the dynamics of resource-dependen…
Neither prepared nor transformed: Institutional responses to unconventional oil and gas development in Australian and Canadian communities
Cities, hinterlands and disconnected urban-rural development: Perspectives from sparsely populated areas
This article introduces the special issue ‘Rural hinterland development in sparsely populated areas (SPAs): new challenges and opportunities arising from urbanisation within the periphery’. It problematises the relationships between growing cities and hinterland areas in SPAs, such as those commonly found in Arctic, Outback and similar remote resource peripheries of developed countries. Many SPAs are rapidly urbanising, with polarised development…
Counter-urbanisation in pre-pandemic times: Disentangling the influences of amenity and disamenity
The COVID-19 pandemic has stimulated a resurgence in counter-urbanisation in Australia with ex-urban populations leaving behind the perceived disamenity of city life for simpler, cheaper and lockdown-free lives. This article investigates the drivers of in-migration and net migration into non-metropolitan New South Wales from the metropolitan zone between 2011 and 2016, focusing on the potential draw of rural amenity, together with the potential ‘…
Wool and the relative resilience of Western Australian Wheatbelt economies
This article seeks to examine the path dependence and relative resilience of rural economies by focusing on the dynamics of the wool industry, a former mainstay of the economic base of many, if not most, Australian rural economies throughout most of the twentieth century. Based on a case study of the Western Australian Wheatbelt, a region in which broadacre cropping and Merino sheep grazing formed a cohesive farming enterprise type for many decad…
Adaptive capacities and social resilience on Kangaroo Island: Beyond the staples trap
This article uses the lens of evolutionary economic geography to consider adaptive capacities and forms of social resilience that manifest in rural, primary commodity-dependent regions in the face of structural forces to which such regions seem predisposed. Using a case study of Kangaroo Island, South Australia, the article explores the demographic and social impacts that a sudden and dramatic commodity market collapse in the 1990s had on this ru…
Bending the arc of the staples trap: Negotiating rural resource revenues in an age of policy incoherence
Path dependency or investing in place: Understanding the changing conditions for rural resource regions
Migrant integration in rural New Immigration Destinations: An institutional and triangular perspective
New Immigration Destinations (NID) unravelling the challenges and opportunities for migrants and for host communities
Rural geography III: Marketing, mobilities, measurement and metanarratives
This report focuses on the individual and collective capacities of rural people to develop innovative and entrepreneurial approaches to local development (e.g. via place marketing) and to create music, art, prose and other cultural forms in place which in themselves serve to promote rural localities and regions to non-local people. In addition, it considers people’s propensities to move to new places on a permanent or temporary basis, and how thi…
The redefined role of finance in Australian agriculture
In their highly influential teaching and research text Global Restructuring: The Australian Experience Fagan and Webber set out a substantivist, institutionalist and multi-scalar account of the Australian space economy’s relatively rapid and radical globalisation after 1980. This paper extends Fagan and Webber’s global restructuring thesis to Australian farming and agriculture, connecting historical and more recent scholarship on agriculture–fina…
Behavioral Geography
Behavioral geography encompasses a broad field of human geography that became influential during the 1960s and 1970s. It emerged in reaction to the “quantitative turn” associated with the spatial sciences paradigm of the 1950s and 1960s. A fundamental goal of behavioral geography is to understand how and why people perceive environments in the way they do, and how these perceptions influence actual spatial behavior. Behavioral geography, which wa…
Heading down to the local? Australian rural development and the evolving spatiality of the craft beer sector
Rural geography II: Scalar and social constructionist perspectives on climate change adaptation and rural resilience
This report considers rural geography scholarship in relation to the field of climate change adaptation. While applied perspectives on the modelling and mapping of the potential impacts of climate change-related hazard events on rural localities continue to be an important research theme, more theoretically sophisticated and interpretivist approaches are providing more challenging understandings of the multi-scalar nature of climate change adapta…
Rural transitions in the Nambucca Valley: Socio-demographic change in a disadvantaged rural locale
Rural geography I: Resource peripheries and the creation of new global commodity chains
This report focuses on the now substantial international rural geography literature on the emergence of so-called ‘resource peripheries’, linked to the economic expansion of rapidly industrializing nations such as India and China. The report outlines the major foci and key arguments of this body of work, noting its connections to, but also elaborations of, important concepts used within rural geography, including global commodity chains and their…
Rural Community and Rural Resilience: What is important to farmers in keeping their country towns alive
New Immigration Destinations (NID) unravelling the challenges and opportunities for migrants and for host communities
From Pillar to Post? In search of the post-productivist countryside in Australia
According to a growing number of commentators, the agricultural sectors and rural areas of advanced Western nations are experiencing a transition from productivism to post-productivism. In Britain and Western Europe, where this putative transition is most evident, the salient features of the shift include: the gradual removal of farm-level subsidies and related stimulatory policies; the introduction of a range of agri-environmental programs aimed…
Rural population density: Its impact on social and demographic aspects of rural communities
The fall and rise of agricultural productivism? An Antipodean viewpoint
Much debated in the early 2000s, the productivist/post-productivist transition is revisited from an Antipodean perspective from where it was variously both strongly adopted and vigorously contested as a theorization of rural change. The context in which the terminology of productivism and post-productivism, particularly the various classes of the former, appeared is discussed. Although multifunctionalism is endorsed, the persistence of productivi…
A Multicultural and Multifunctional Countryside? International Labour Migration and Australia's Productivist Heartlands: International Labour Migration and Australia's Productivist Heartlands
In 2007, Michael Woods posited the notion of ‘the global countryside’ as a hypothetical space within which globalising tendencies are fully realised in the transformation of rural place. Rather than viewing rural change as being ‘determined’ by global processes, Woods sought to encourage more nuanced accounts that could ‘hold together’ multiple scales in their narratives of rural restructuring. After three decades of neoliberal trade and agricult…
Path dependence, resilience and the evolution of new rural economies: Perspectives from rural Western Australia
The Amenity Complex: Towards a Framework for Analysing and Predicting the Emergence of a Multifunctional Countryside in Australia
There is growing consensus among academics, regional development organisations and rural communities that the future growth and development of rural regions is increasingly dependent upon their ability to convey, to both established and prospective residents, the 'amenity' of their local physical, social and economic environments. However, little research to date has sought to identify exactly what comprises 'amenity' in the rural context, or has…
Migrant integration in rural New Immigration Destinations: An institutional and triangular perspective
Population Growth and Change: Implications for Australia's Cities and Regions
Australia's distinctive pattern of settlement has long presented a suite of social, economic, infrastructural, and environmental challenges for the nation's cities and regions. These challenges will be intensified by the population growth and dynamics anticipated in the 2010 Intergenerational Report. Future growth will inevitably have differential impacts for metropolitan, regional, and rural settlements, and for inland and coastal regions. This …
Rural Youth Migration Trends in Australia: An Overview of Recent Trends and Two Inland Case Studies
Much of what has been written on the topic of Australian rural youth migration trends and processes has often proceeded from data-free, or data-poor grounds. In this context, this paper analyses recent trends in youth (15 to 24 years of age) migration for a temporally-consistent set of Statistical Divisions (SDs) in inland rural Australia, and for local government areas within the Northern Tablelands and Slopes and Ranges of northern New South Wa…
Bending the arc of the staples trap: Negotiating rural resource revenues in an age of policy incoherence
Rural transitions in the Nambucca Valley: Socio-demographic change in a disadvantaged rural locale
Trouble in Paradise? Governing Australia's multifunctional rural landscapes
Australia's rural lands are undergoing a process of intensive re-evaluation whereby previously unthought of, ignored, and excluded interests are gradually but emphatically asserting themselves. This re-interpretation, which itself reflects a transformation in established relationships between local communities, the three tiers of government in Australia and the private and non-governmental sectors, is being expressed in spatially uneven ways. Neo…
The Amenity Principle, Internal Migration, and Rural Development in Australia
Arguably, rural land markets in Australia are currently in a high state of flux, with a panoply of competing interests seeking to capitalize on both the traditional and a range of newly emergent values anchored in land. Amenity-led migration is, we argue, an important strand of this renewed interest in rural lands, albeit one that is highly spatially selective. Employing a predictive and synoptic model of migration attractiveness across southeast…
Evolutionary Perspectives on Rural Australia
An enduring concern within Australian rural geography has been to understand the nature and implications of change. Much of the intellectual effort has been focused on interpreting how rural economies, populations, social institutions, cultures, and land uses have been transformed through processes operating across a range of spatial and temporal scales. This paper offers a critical appraisal of recent rural research in Australia and how this bod…
Neoliberalism in Antipodean Spaces and Times: An Introduction to the Special Theme Issue
It is easy to tell simple stories about the past. The tag 'Keynesian-Fordism', for instance, brings to mind a period of post-war circumstances in the richer nations where the widespread achievements of rising incomes was secured through state management of demand, regimes of regulation and potent redistribution strategies. The present rarely sheds its complexity so readily. Yet, there is an almost irresistible temptation to tag the present, to st…
Sea change: Movement from metropolitan to Arcadian Australia
Local – If Possible: How the Spatial Networking of Economic Relations amongst Farm Enterprises Aids Small Town Survival in Rural Australia
Pritchard B., Argent N., Baum S., Bourke L., Martin J., McManus P., Sorensen A. and Walmsley J. Local – if possible: how the spatial networking of economic relations amongst farm enterprises aids small town survival in rural Australia, Regional Studies. Over recent decades, the tendency in developed countries has been the consolidation of farms into fewer and larger units, and a shifting of economic functions from smaller to larger population set…
Reinterpreting Core and Periphery in Australia's Mineral and Energy Resources Boom: An Innisian perspective on the Pilbara
Australia's current robust macro-economic condition, at least relative to that of many comparator nations within Europe and the USA, is built largely on the nation's particular insertion into the global economy as an abundant and reliable source of mineral and energy resources. Within Australia, though, public concern is mounting over the many direct and indirect economic, environmental and social effects of mineral and energy resource extraction…
The Neoliberal Seduction: Governing-at-a-Distance, Community Development and the Battle over Financial Services Provision in Australia
This paper is concerned with understanding the reasons for the apparent success of neoliberalism: why the model of the ‘entrepreneurial, self-reliant community’ has been adopted so widely and readily across Australia. It does this through an analysis of two events in the restructuring of financial services provision in regional Australia during the 1990s and 2000s: the John Laws/Australian Bankers’ Association ‘cash for comment’ affair, and the r…
Rural geography I: Resource peripheries and the creation of new global commodity chains
This report focuses on the now substantial international rural geography literature on the emergence of so-called ‘resource peripheries’, linked to the economic expansion of rapidly industrializing nations such as India and China. The report outlines the major foci and key arguments of this body of work, noting its connections to, but also elaborations of, important concepts used within rural geography, including global commodity chains and their…
Heading down to the local? Australian rural development and the evolving spatiality of the craft beer sector
Rural geography III: Marketing, mobilities, measurement and metanarratives
This report focuses on the individual and collective capacities of rural people to develop innovative and entrepreneurial approaches to local development (e.g. via place marketing) and to create music, art, prose and other cultural forms in place which in themselves serve to promote rural localities and regions to non-local people. In addition, it considers people’s propensities to move to new places on a permanent or temporary basis, and how thi…
The redefined role of finance in Australian agriculture
In their highly influential teaching and research text Global Restructuring: The Australian Experience Fagan and Webber set out a substantivist, institutionalist and multi-scalar account of the Australian space economy’s relatively rapid and radical globalisation after 1980. This paper extends Fagan and Webber’s global restructuring thesis to Australian farming and agriculture, connecting historical and more recent scholarship on agriculture–fina…
Inside the black box: Dimensions of gender, generation and scale in the Australian rural restructuring process
Whither the lender of last resort: The rise and fall of public farm credit in Australia and New Zealand
Financial Exclusion in Rural and Remote New South Wales, Australia: A Geography of Bank Branch Rationalisation, 1981–98
The provision of financial services in rural Australia is a significant public policy issue, reflected in the high level of media and political interest in the recent spate of branch closures. There are, however, many aspects of the current debate regarding the delivery of financial services to rural communities that are, at best, less than ideal and, at worst, erroneous. Using telephone directories for New South Wales, non‐metropolitan bank bran…
Rural population density: Its impact on social and demographic aspects of rural communities
A global model or a scaled-down version: Geographies of convergence and divergence in the Australian retail banking sector
From Pillar to Post? In search of the post-productivist countryside in Australia
According to a growing number of commentators, the agricultural sectors and rural areas of advanced Western nations are experiencing a transition from productivism to post-productivism. In Britain and Western Europe, where this putative transition is most evident, the salient features of the shift include: the gradual removal of farm-level subsidies and related stimulatory policies; the introduction of a range of agri-environmental programs aimed…
Sea change: Movement from metropolitan to Arcadian Australia
Tracing the Density Impulse in Rural Settlement Systems: A Quantitative Analysis of the Factors Underlying Rural Population Density Across South-Eastern Australia, 1981–2001
Neoliberalism in Antipodean Spaces and Times: An Introduction to the Special Theme Issue
It is easy to tell simple stories about the past. The tag 'Keynesian-Fordism', for instance, brings to mind a period of post-war circumstances in the richer nations where the widespread achievements of rising incomes was secured through state management of demand, regimes of regulation and potent redistribution strategies. The present rarely sheds its complexity so readily. Yet, there is an almost irresistible temptation to tag the present, to st…
The Neoliberal Seduction: Governing-at-a-Distance, Community Development and the Battle over Financial Services Provision in Australia
This paper is concerned with understanding the reasons for the apparent success of neoliberalism: why the model of the ‘entrepreneurial, self-reliant community’ has been adopted so widely and readily across Australia. It does this through an analysis of two events in the restructuring of financial services provision in regional Australia during the 1990s and 2000s: the John Laws/Australian Bankers’ Association ‘cash for comment’ affair, and the r…
Neoliberalism: A Critical Reader - Edited by Alfredo Saad-Filho and Deborah Johnston
The Amenity Complex: Towards a Framework for Analysing and Predicting the Emergence of a Multifunctional Countryside in Australia
There is growing consensus among academics, regional development organisations and rural communities that the future growth and development of rural regions is increasingly dependent upon their ability to convey, to both established and prospective residents, the 'amenity' of their local physical, social and economic environments. However, little research to date has sought to identify exactly what comprises 'amenity' in the rural context, or has…
Perceived density, social interaction and morale in New South Wales rural communities
The Sponge City Hypothesis: Does it hold water
The notion of sponge cities has attracted considerable attention in the media, in the policy arena, and in academia. It rests on the notion that some regional centres ‘soak up’ population and business from a ‘pool’ of surrounding areas, thereby appearing as ‘oases’ of growth in areas of population decline. Specifically, the notion of sponge cities rests on two premises and a deduction: some large towns and provincial cities are growing; surroundi…
Rural Youth Migration Trends in Australia: An Overview of Recent Trends and Two Inland Case Studies
Much of what has been written on the topic of Australian rural youth migration trends and processes has often proceeded from data-free, or data-poor grounds. In this context, this paper analyses recent trends in youth (15 to 24 years of age) migration for a temporally-consistent set of Statistical Divisions (SDs) in inland rural Australia, and for local government areas within the Northern Tablelands and Slopes and Ranges of northern New South Wa…
Getting On, Getting Up and Getting Out? Broadening Perspectives on Rural Youth Migration
For the 2006 combined International Geographical Union, Institute of Australian Geographers Inc. (IAG) and New Zealand Geographical Society conference in Brisbane, the IAG Cultural Geography and Rural Geography Study Groups collaborated to offer a special themed session on ‘rural youth issues’. Our pre-conference blurb on the session invited papers on a range of issues facing young people in rural areas. Yet the eventuating session focussed almos…
From the Inside Looking out and the Outside Looking in: Whatever Happened to 'Behavioural Geography
As part of the Institute of Australian Geographers' Millennium Project, this article examines the shift of behavioural geography from a cutting edge sub-discipline to a branch of enquiry that is now much less prominent in mainstream human geography, especially in Australia. Through an exploration of the rationale for behavioural geography, a brief outline of the nature of the work that was done, and a consideration of the critiques of behavioural…
Local – If Possible: How the Spatial Networking of Economic Relations amongst Farm Enterprises Aids Small Town Survival in Rural Australia
Pritchard B., Argent N., Baum S., Bourke L., Martin J., McManus P., Sorensen A. and Walmsley J. Local – if possible: how the spatial networking of economic relations amongst farm enterprises aids small town survival in rural Australia, Regional Studies. Over recent decades, the tendency in developed countries has been the consolidation of farms into fewer and larger units, and a shifting of economic functions from smaller to larger population set…
Rural Community and Rural Resilience: What is important to farmers in keeping their country towns alive
What's New about Rural Governance? Australian perspectives and introduction to the special issue
In spite of an infamously lacklustre campaign, replete with anodyne slogans, the 2010 Australian federal election was a remarkable political event. It produced one of the most unusual outcomes in living memory: a hung parliament, with the balance of power held by a handful of politicians who, collectively, reflected the broad spectrum of political views elected to the new parliament. Eventually, the deadlock over who could form government fell to…
Trouble in Paradise? Governing Australia's multifunctional rural landscapes
Australia's rural lands are undergoing a process of intensive re-evaluation whereby previously unthought of, ignored, and excluded interests are gradually but emphatically asserting themselves. This re-interpretation, which itself reflects a transformation in established relationships between local communities, the three tiers of government in Australia and the private and non-governmental sectors, is being expressed in spatially uneven ways. Neo…
Population Growth and Change: Implications for Australia's Cities and Regions
Australia's distinctive pattern of settlement has long presented a suite of social, economic, infrastructural, and environmental challenges for the nation's cities and regions. These challenges will be intensified by the population growth and dynamics anticipated in the 2010 Intergenerational Report. Future growth will inevitably have differential impacts for metropolitan, regional, and rural settlements, and for inland and coastal regions. This …
Rural Policing and Policing the Rural: A Constable Countryside? - Edited by Rob I. Mawby and Richard Yarwood
Evolutionary Perspectives on Rural Australia
An enduring concern within Australian rural geography has been to understand the nature and implications of change. Much of the intellectual effort has been focused on interpreting how rural economies, populations, social institutions, cultures, and land uses have been transformed through processes operating across a range of spatial and temporal scales. This paper offers a critical appraisal of recent rural research in Australia and how this bod…
A creativity-led rural renaissance? Amenity-led migration, the creative turn and the uneven development of rural Australia
Geography (49 works) · Economics (45 works) · Rural development and sustainability (43 works) · Political science (41 works) · Sociology (37 works) · Economic geography (29 works) · Economic growth (29 works) · Migration, Aging, and Tourism Studies (19 works) · Population (17 works) · Business (15 works)