A new look InSight now available
The Regional Australia Institute (RAI) has today launched its new version of InSight, giving regional stakeholders and government information at their fingertips about how specific regional communities are performing.
This second edition of InSight aims to help educate stakeholders about how economic competitiveness varies across regional Australia.
It’s an online tool that compares and ranks the economic performance of more than 540 Local Government Areas (LGAs) across Australia and also 59 Regional Development Australia (RDA) regions.
Put simply, if you log onto InSight from the RAI website, you can quickly find out how your area is performing and how it ranks against other regions across the country. Knowing how your LGA or RDA region ranks and where its competitive strengths and weaknesses lie are key to evidence based strategy; and informing and influencing decision making.
Regions are ranked across 10 themes, which are made up of 71 indicators, each available on a consistent basis for each area. These themes are globally recognised as measures of economic competitiveness.
The ten themes are: Demography, Institutional Foundations, Infrastructure and Essential Services, Natural Resources, Economic Fundamentals, Business Sophistication, Human Capital, Innovation, Technological Readiness, and Labour Market Efficiency.
In our latest edition, users will see that the figures have changed. InSight now uses a decile-based approach to rank each LGA and RDA region. It segments the regions into ten groups (called deciles) on a scale from 1 to 10, with 1 indicating the strongest performance.
While we are focussed on regional LGAs, this data tool also covers all metropolitan areas. A lot of what the RAI knows about regional Australia is drawn from InSight data and our team uses it extensively in our research.
Over the last few years, many regional community leaders, regional experts, government agencies, journalists and academics have been using InSight to gauge how different LGAs are performing.
With this update we have also changed the subscription model for InSight Premium. The new model is based on sessions, and there is a range of subscription options you can choose from to suit your needs.
InSight Premium gives unprecedented access and usage rights for InSight data, including export options, theme analysis, and access to the 2011 data for comparison purposes.
For more information or to subscribe to InSight Premium, go to www.regionalaustralia.org.au/home/insight-second-edition.
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